John Quiggin

Duh!
As a Republican supporter and a RWDB. I can assure you that we want nothing more important than a Bush win, so that we can tackle the second leg of the Axis Of Evil. We have been destabilising Iran for the last twelve months, so why wouldn't we want to take things to their logical conclusion?

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, there are no rational Republican supporters left. Iraq may be Waterloo for the United States, but big states can lumber along for a long time after they've destroyed themselves (ie: the late unlamented USSR.) And, at least from my viewpoint, it feels like the United States is right on the verge of losing it all, and four more years of rabbit-hole government has the very real prospect of not only killing the economy, but ending up with a Soviet-style disintegration.

If I had US$50 million, I wouldn't care about this; I'd just roll all my hard currency to Euros, retire to my villa in the South of France and wait for the US economy to collapse so I could buy myself into the landed gentry. But I don't, so it's not a good election to lose.

The US economy is not going to collapse anytime soon, who ever sits in the White House.

But, what Soros calls, the twin bubbles of US hyper-power have been burst:

• finanicial: the idea that inflated capital values can be turned into industrial power;
• martial: the idea that military supremacy can translate into on the ground political power

Whoever is in office will have to pick up the pieces, and the pieces are only going to get more fragemented as time goes on.

The Washington Monthly has a special edition on how to clean up Bush's mess. Norquist appears to think everything is fine and dandy for Bush II so long as Democrat funding is reduced. This kind of partisan vindictiveness is a symptom, not cure for, the problem.

Mallaby covers the fiscal/financial woes which are intractable and demand realistic solutions. Gideon Rose tackles the martial overstretch problem which now appears to be heading for the "Too Hard" baskket.

I therefore agree with Pr Q. From a Democratic partisan point of view, this election is a Good One to Lose.

Let the Republicans carry the can for this mess and clean it up. Kerry is pretty hopeless anyway.

Just testing

well both candidates have tried pretty hard to lose the race. all john kerry has to do is tell the electorate of his military service another fifty-something times. equally brilliant is bush's strategy of pissing off his conservative base with big spending in an attempt to woo voters that will never vote for him in the first place.

interestingly enough john kerry's official web page mentions "vietnam" 205 times and "afghanistan" 107 times.