Sarah Palin...

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...and thank God for that. A woman who refused to abort her Down's Syndrome baby is my kind of politician. It seems that McCain has escaped the traps laid for him by his Republican "friends" and selected the ideal candidate: a reformer, a person of impeccable honesty, a high-achieving married woman and mother (that will rub salt into the wounds of Hillary's supporters), a woman with the vigour of youth still about her to balance McCain's white hair, and an outsider. As if that wasn't enough, she is even a former beauty queen! Thinking about it, she was the obvious choice, and it is only the navel-gazing self-regard of the Republican rumour mill that could have distracted us from her obvious merits to worrying about machine candidates like Romney or Liebermann.

Especially for jamesenge: I have come to respect and admire Senator Obama, but as an opponent. He is an opponent worth having; one can hardly wonder that grizzled old machine politicians grown grey in local struggles identified him at once as a coming superstar. It was like the grandees of the barely-founded Republican party sending each other enthusiastic messages after the Cooper Union speech: "We have the perfect candidate, and never mind that you never heard his name before". But there is one fundamental issue that separates me from him; namely, abortion. If the Republicans had nominated an abortionist such as Giuliani or Romney, I would have said that Obama is the better man. But Senator McCain, apart from himself leaving the impression that he hs "a fully paid-up member of the human race" (to quote a quip about a British politician), has shown himself his own man even when that could have made him unpopular, and has now made a selection of running mate that is as good as a statement. And while Senator Obama remains an impressive candidate, I will now be cheering for his opponent.

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British politics are discouraging. Matters of principle are discussed, if they ever are discussed, on such a narrow area of Political Correctness that Britain's so-called Conservative party has more in common with the Kos Kids than with anything properly called conservative. To give you an idea, it is a Tory MP, John Bercow, who has proposed an amendment to a health bill which would criminalize, and punish with two years in jail, any advertising, publicity or propaganda for any alternative to abortion. The amendment is written with the slimy astuteness of his craft, looking on the surface as if it only criminalized "misleading and false" claims, but look at what it actually says, and you will realize that it clearly refuses to stop there. Any propaganda against abortion becomes a crime. And this is a supposed conservative. But most of all, moral and large-scale political issues are not discussed at all. The parties compete exclusively on which of them is the best manager of the economy. But as their principles, in so far as they have any, are the same, even this competition is basically fake. The ghastly house-credit bubble that is devouring Britain's prosperity and confidence now - I have seen it grow since the days of Margaret Thatcher, cultivated and sedulously encouraged by both parties. In the early days, as soon as I realized what was going on, I started saying that this could not go on, that you could not build the prosperity of a country on selling each other property on credit at a costantly increased price. They said they had discarded Keynesianism; in fact, they had thrown away the good bits and kept the bad ones - belief in credit for its own sake, and counting meaningless activity that only moves possessions from hand to hand is as good as genuine, constructive, productive activity. But as the housing bubble kept going from year to year, as Thatcher gave way to Major and Major gave way to Blair, I started doubting my own opinion, and fell silent on the matter. Well, the Punisher is here, all right; and no politician, even those who stand out for intelligence and plain speaking (and those are only two or three in the whole country) seems to see their way out of it. That is because, having completely accepted the groupthink I spoke of, they are unable to stand outside their own failed circle of certainties and look at it as a whole. What we need is someone to tell us: the model of the last thirty years has failed; we have to reconstruct our prosperity on the basis of individual and family savings and of productive investment, creating real wealth. Instead of which, they are still struggling to find ways to get the collapsing housing market moving, as if that would solve all the accumulating problems of the nation. What a crew of gibbering fools.

As for Italian politics, they are plain embarrassing. And the embarrassment is to be summed up in one word: Berlusconi. The fact that the man is now actually performing decently does not take away from fifteen years of solid embarrassment and disgrace, not to mention a left wing that seems determined to make him look good.