a british perspective

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian wrote a column today that I can't help but speaks for most of the non-US (or US-occupied) world...and for much of us here (I know I'm included). It's well worth checking out and you should (all these links are to the column so you don't need to click each of them...just trying to make sure people read it), but here are some high points:

Quite frankly, [Bush is] either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it's the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he's listening to something we can't hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man's a tool.

So I sit there and I watch this and I start scratching my head, because I'm trying to work out why Bush is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country. His performance is so transparently bizarre, so feeble and stumbling, it's a miracle he wasn't laughed off the stage. And then I start hunting around the internet, looking to see what the US media made of the whole "wire" debate. And they just let it die. They mentioned it in passing, called it a wacko conspiracy theory and moved on.

The "wire" thing has to do with the bulge in the back thing that I posted shortly after the debates...where there's speculation that Bush often (including in the debates) hears voices through a wire in an ear that tell him what to say. Anyway...

Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat. And besides, in a fight between a tree and a bush, I know who I'd favour.

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us.

Okay, so I quoted most of it anyway, but you should still check it out, if only because the last line where Brooker sarcastically asks where Booth, Oswald, and Hinkley seems to have Matt Drudge's panties in a bunch.