Weapon of mass destruction disarmed

Indications are that time has come for the Republican warmongers in the US to take at least a 4-year breather but hopefully 8 years. As Martin Sheen advises Michael Douglas in The American President, "with all due respect Sir, the American people have their own way of deciding what is their business and what not." It seems, the American people have at last decided what their business is, and this week they spoke.
As the results of the US mid-term elections came out on Wednesday, it became clear, as was expected, that the Republicans have lost their control over the House of Representatives. According to CNN projections, the Democrats will hold 50 seats, the two independents will fall in with them and the Republigators will have 49. But similar to the previous presidential election when the State of Florida held the key to the balance of power, it now lies in Virginia. The Democrats need six seats to control the Senate, and given how close the count is, it may still take weeks of legal haggling before a final result is available. In the wake of this clear signal from the American people, their defence minister, Donald Rumsfeld has decided it is safer to go before the ICC cites him for his doings in Iraq.

American politics run in cycles of eight years unless the incumbent administration creates a real fiasco during its first term. But it also runs according to clearly discernible management styles. My take on their affairs is that the Republicans are more outward-looking hence foreign policy, especially war, becomes an important tool. The domestic economy is not uppermost on the minds of good staunch Texas-style Republicans. The Democrats, in turn, care about the domestic economy so what broth the Republicans have cooked up in their eight years, it usually requires the Democrats to untangle and fix it so that the American economy can post good returns on good growth so that eight years later, the Republicans can have all the money in the world to buy time in office through tax rebates, and to declare and conduct really costly and inefficient wars. And so it goes on and on.

The problem right now is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a candidate that remotely looks like a future president. Yet, I still believe the American public has spoken and the results of this week's elections are only the prelude to the change in leadership that will inevitably happen in two years from now. Remember, the same thing happened to Clinton in his second term. Due to his exploits, he was so discredited that he lost control over both houses in the mid-term, throwing the entire American political scene into a two-year impasse. Exactly the same will happen now. For the next two years, expect much grooming, positioning and engineering of the images of presidential hopefuls. I believe the conflict in Iraq has abruptly and immediately come to a de facto end. Further, I do not think we shall hear too much of Iran, North Korea and China until the Democrat president is in the White House, and then only to make noise in a harmless attempt to copycat noisy Namibian politicians seeing that we have become the darling country of every American outlaw.

The Democrats I expect, after the party, to start working up a real groundswell attempt to convince the American public they can fix the economy again. So expect lots of hot air how to fix the housing bubble (it’s busy fixing itself), how to fix the disastrous health insurance industry, how to try and remedy the pension fund industry, and, finally, how to bring the magnificent trade deficit with China but to manageable magnitudes. But the Democrats are also known, inevitably, to tax both rich and poor to put the house in order, and the American public believes that only for so long, so the next eight year cycle starts over again, based on public opinion and sentiment. And that is simply the way American politics work. Independents like Ross Perrott have wasted many futile hours trying to knock sense into the heads of the average hillbillies, to no avail. Presidential elections are driven by vast sums of money, and those that put up the money want to see their interests served afterwards. So it becomes the public spectacle we are used to, it installs an unfortunate individual as the front man for unimaginably powerful people, and it takes the world and the American public for another eight-year ride.