"Exactly what's needed"

Good god, is there no end to this Administrations complete inability to think it has made a single mistake? An increasingly-large chorus of retired generals with on the ground experience in Iraq have all said that Rumsfeld is a liability, and yet Dubya dismisses them as irrelevant and wrong.

Does any other country run itself this way? Major cities lost, spending through the roof, revenues through the floor, inteligence falsified, information illegally leaked, lies lies lies lies and yet the administration carries on in some strange Pollyanna-meets-Ostrich-Defence approach, perpetually insisting the sky is blue with its head in the sand not noticing the thunderheads.

This, at least, also shows that the parliamentary system that the Americans abandoned and that we kept has some sense. Although the Official Opposition is subject to many of the Government's whims, it is not completely emasculated here. The Dems have no power to do anything - to call hearings, to force the Government to answer questions, &c.

If Dubya and his robber baron cabinet had to stand up for an hour, every day, to be grilled by the opposition, to defend policies, to explain itself without the chance to prepare spin, without the ability to stage-manage the questions and the scene - do you think that we'd be where we are now?

We even saw in Canada a rejection of the tactic that worked so well here. Harper tried to paint people opposed to Afghanistan as unpatriotic or "not supporting our troops" - and it backfired on him.

But in the US, where opposition has no real platform to speak from, and the Administration controls when and where and how messages get out, there is no real debate.

A government whose feet are not held to the fire by an opposition is an autocracy, not matter how democratically elected.