I wonder how long it will take America to recover from George Bush's uniquely blinkered and self-righteous brand of ineptitude? In the past five years he's demonstrated to the world that we don't know how to win a modern guerrilla war. He's demonstrated that we don't understand even the basics of waging a propaganda war. He's demonstrated that other countries don't need to pay any attention to our threats. He's demonstrated that we're good at talking tough and sending troops into battle, but otherwise clueless about using the levers of statecraft in the service of our own interests. If he had set out to willfully and deliberately expose our weaknesses to the world and undermine our strengths, he couldn't have done more to cripple America's power and influence in the world. Beneath the bluster, he's done more to weaken our national security than any president since World War II.

I remain puzzled that any of my conservative American friends - and there are few remain who can one must admit - can must the vaguest defence for this American Adminstration that has had virtual free reign in doing what it wants, and has proven so spectacularly incompetent and, worse, apparently utterly unaware of its own incompetence. The pig-headed adherence to simple-minded sloganeering as policy regardless of what reality shows is what led me to start calling them the Right Bolsheviks since they remind me so much of the pig-headed dupes who followed Bolshevik (the original Left kind) so very blindly.

Of course the ten years thing is a bit much.