Thursday, January 31, 2008

fracturing alliances

Good article by Jonathan Raban on the US elections today in the Guardian:

"What's fascinating about this primary season in the US is how on both sides, Republican and Democrat, the campaigns are exposing all the underlying fault-lines in American society: in nearly 20 years of living in this country, I've never seen these fissures so clearly mapped before. First, Karl Rove's grand alliance of fundamentalist Christians, corporate CEOs, libertarians, neoconservatives and traditional small-government-big-defence types, which was designed to establish the Republicans as the reigning party of the 21st century, showed signs of breaking up into its original component parts in the mid-term elections of 2006. Now the fundamentalists have their own candidate (Mike Huckabee); the corporations theirs (Mitt Romney); the libertarians have Ron Paul; just hours ago, the neocons still had Rudy Giuliani, one of whose senior advisers was the altogether terrifying figure of Norman "World War Four" Podhoretz; and John McCain's old-soldier pitch is aimed at those surviving conservatives - a likely majority, it seems at present - for whom none of the above categories will serve."
All of which makes this a really fascinating election. Read the rest of the article, it's good.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi! Actually found your site after watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America and Googled "fish and Anchor." Your review of the show was spot on. Although here in America we've just seen it for the first time. Gordon has a huge following here in the USA and everything and anything he's involved with is an instant success.

Then I perused your website a bit more and happened upon your posting of "Fracturing Alliances." I followed the link to Jonathan Raban's article on the US Election and, honestly, it's a brilliant piece of shit. Sorry friend, but reading our crappy newspapers and watching our crappy news programs , well, you just don't get the whole picture. My favorite part was "the neocons still had Rudy Giuliani." HA!!! Are you kidding? Rudy? A Neocon? Brother, he's the farthest thing from it. Consider this simple fact. ASide from being Mayor of the second most liberal city in the USA, his stances on most issues critical to those "neocons" are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

You've got a great blog, i just had to chime in...

Gotta run, another Kitchen Nightmare is on...even though it's a rerun...

Adios from America!!!