Carl,

If i may correct you on a minor point - American's DO have a choice.
They get to choose betwean the greater of two weevils. Ones chosen by other people (largely unknown and unseen) to be the 'human' face of a political viewpoint and it's corresponding opposing view (divide and conquer!) ie. the Reps and Dems.

Or they can choose to do what the vast majority of American's choose to do and that is have no say in 'deciding' who will get to rip them off for another four years by failing to bother to 'vote' and taking that which they - the masses - feel powerless to prevent, like all good lambs to the slaughter should do.

Instead of whining doing nothing and putting up with a crap system the majority should get organised make a plan for a better system and start putting it into place.

But of course whining and complaining and doing nothing is the easy part.

Probably best to leave the actual doing up to somone who wants to - like, say, those already reaping the benefits of being in power huh?

Whaddya Say Australia? - should we be like the US and let someone else do it for us?

People we can trust like Johhny and Kimmy? or their faceless puppetmasters?

Or could we perhaps have a LOCAL government representative who meets with those in his electorate to discuss issues and ideas for our Nation to follow and have a 'grass roots' government system that WE control, and who answers directly to US, not some lobbyist 2000 km's away from us.

On second thoughts - just forget it. I might have to miss a Big Brother live eviction to attend a meeting on whether to accept Nuclear Power over Renewable resource energy generation. Stuff that!

Thanks for this piece Geoff, it explains a few things I did not know.

Braindrain,

I take your point, my level of cynicism varies from day to day.

One person said to me that if you don't vote you dont have the right to complain, and the lesser of two evils is still at least a choice.

But have a look at the lesser of their 2 evils, the recent military commissions act, which scraps habeus corpus and effectiveley gives the President the same dictatorial powers as stalin was supported by 12 democrats in the Senate, 12!

When the congress voted on a resolution in support of Israel in its destruction of Lebanon the numbers were something like 432 to 1.

And poor old Ralphy Nader polls about 1.6 percent.

I guess the way I see it is that the problems in America are WAY bigger than republocrat v democran. And i fear that when the problems come to a head, the warzone will shift from the middle east to land of the free itself.

cheers for your comments.

Carl,

My level of cynicism varies in direct relationship to my 'exposure' to the 'wisdom' of Jonh Howard (or most politician's now i come to think of it - i would truly struggle to think of even one i consider worth half the money we pay 'em).

I am not certain where you live; here in Aus or elsewhere, but your level of awareness of American politics seems strong - not that there is anything wrong with that!.

You are quite right, compared with some countries the lesser of two weevils IS still a 'choice' - a VERY POOR one and quite frankly Australia deserves better than to make such a 'choice' (of someone else's making - who on earth picked J Koward and K Beastly to run their party's and effectively leaving Aussie voters no other choices? - would any Australian seriously have picked those two out of all our 20 million to run things? We vote for these guys 'policy's' basically out of dislike for the other side more than we do out of support for who is in power.)

First Johnny wanted to be tied to Britain's Apron Strings cos he fancies Our Liz, but like a number of older married men he's 'turned' and wants to lick GW's arse on every political topic now so he can get economic 'favours' (he thinks) for us here in poor little Oz.

Looking to America for answers seems to me to me erroneously myopic.

Like i said... we could (and should) do better.

Declaring 'Neutrality' like Switzerland did in WWII could be a starting point - that takes away Bin Laden and Muslim's reason to invade or bomb us without costing a cent! While still allowing us unlimited trading partners : )