More bad news

"America itself, its state and system of government, is undergoing defeat", says Anthony Barnett:

It is a moral defeat, from Guantánamo to the Manichaean unilateralism of good against evil. It is a constitutional defeat for a system that permitted Bush to steal an election and whose courts have yet to re-establish fundamental rights. It is a democratic defeat because the politics which permitted it is based on a financially suborned, gerrymandered, often uncheckable, low-turnout voting system that threatens to reduce suffrage in the US to government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich – while it invades countries abroad in the name of democratic self-rule. It is a defeat for its media that misleads and misjudges. A defeat for its political class which as a whole has lost the capacity to oppose.

Phew! Glad you got that off your chest, Anthony. Have a glass of water. Meanwhile, in Damascus, Hugo Chavez makes whoopy with the president of a police state who is the son of a mass murder.