This new age has been allowed to develop by the now interminably low standards of the BBC News reporting and lazy journalists who write what they are told rather than find out for themselves.

Consider that our, UK, politicians spent £1 Billion ($2 Billion) on a glorified tent. The Romans, 2,000 years ago, built the coliseum. It helps you realise the gap in leadership quality and ambition.

It is sad that US politics mirrors ours (or vice versa, take your pick). With politicians so determined to concentrate on “electability” rather than political viewpoints, it seems the world will remain in a quagmire.

Bring back the days of my youth where you would just know where pretty much all party members would stand on an issue.

American political culture is configured, at the moment, to create a ratcheting to the right. The Republicans (and the press, which is basically owned by Republican interests) constantly pushes further to the right, while the Democrats make a show of being cooperative. Since there is no national-level third party (a state of affairs encouraged by both the Democrats and the Republicans) the Democrats can thus be right-of-center, yet still be the party of the “left”.

The current situation reflects that: the Republicans have finally reached the point where they may have pushed too far. We have four Republican candidates for president who seriously believe in young-earth creationism, at least two of whom have made it abundantly clear that their long-term goal is theocracy. They may still succeed — people may not trust Fox News and its ilk like they used to, but that doesn’t remove their influence on discourse — but it looks increasingly like only Christian fundamentalists are serious about the Republican campaigns.

Thus control of the country is likely to return to the Democratic party. This is worrisome. Our last Democratic president was Clinton, and the only reason we think of him with fondness is because he was followed by the most extravagant screwup in the country. All three of the Democratic frontrunners right now managed to either vote for the USA-PATRIOT Act (which is the enabling language for Big Brother in America) or for the war in Iraq, or both. None of them has done anything to actually stop the various insanities of the Bush regime. And at the first sign of any complaint at all from the right wing, all three immediately apologize.

As long as we’re talking about discourse, it’s worth noting that there are code words in American political discourse. The most famous is, of course, “family values”, sometimes shortened to “values”. When someone talks about “family values”, they mean “fundamentalist Christianity”. (Not “Christian values”, which are relatively benign, or even values at all, but fundamentalist Christian organization and worship.) There are assorted other ones of varying frequency — “pro-life”, “tough on crime”, “war on drugs”. My favorite is opposition to “Dred Scott”. There was, of course, a real Dred Scott case, but when you hear a right winger talk about Dred Scott today, they’re using it as a euphemism for Roe vs. Wade, the case which set the precedent making abortion legal…