It saddens me to read comments from reasonable, sensible people* saying “we know that Bush is terrible according to any measure, and we’d much rather have a president who wasn’t in league with the religious nutjobs, but we’re fighting for survival so we need to support him”.

If there were a WWII-style war of survival on, then this would be an unfortunate but necessary piece of logic. But under no sane criteria are we at, close to, or even in a position where we need to contemplate such a war. To put it simply, if you are an American, the next president’s abortion policy will have a greater impact on your life than his war policy.

Let’s not fall for George Bush’s self-aggrandising deceptions. The relevant part of the ‘war on terror’ is a policing operation to stop a few thousand terrorists from killing a few thousand more westerners – a worthwhile goal, but hardly the only (or even the key) thing worth worrying about.

Liberal democracy is under little or no threat – and if you want to protect it, it’s far more important to worry about religious fundamentalists gaining political power (in the USA, India, Europe or Iraq) than to worry about them blowing shit up.

* For some reason, anchor hyperlinks on blogs never seem to work for me. If the same is true for you, I mean Craig Bryant’s comment at 10:44pm.