So, do you think George Bush Snr. is furious that his son has permanently tainted his good name, or is he thrilled that he’ll now be remembered by history as ‘The Competent President George Bush’?

Edit: And the Obama team has already taken over the White House website. For some reason, they didn't keep this stuff online. What a pity - how will the world learn about George Bush's unknown virtues now?!

So here’s an oddity – the Liberal Party’s homepage includes links to the New Zealand National party and John McCain websites. Now, I don’t really check party websites that often – but this is a little unusual, yes? I mean, sure, it’s not like it’s a big secret who the Liberals would prefer to see win the upcoming elections - but this sort of blatant endorsement of candidates in foreign elections strikes me as rather odd, and not exactly a good idea, especially in the case of the McCain campaign, who currently looks set for an overwhelming defeat… It’s more probable than not that the Coalition will win an election here while Obama’s still in office in the US, and an endorsement of his opponent is unlikely to do much to strengthen US-Australian relations…

Alright, here's the thing. Madrassa? It means 'school' or 'university'. It's Arabic, meaning literally 'place where learning is done', and it's been adopted as a loan word in a number of languages, including Farsi, Urdu, Turkish, and Indonesian. What it does not mean - in any of these languages - is 'religious school' or 'Islamic school'.

Now, granted, general foreign words are often used in English in a more specific sense, to refer to things specifically from that country; Sombrero and Salsa are two obvious examples. Still, the use of Madrassa in an unmodified sense bothers me; if Biden had said 'seven thousand fundamentalist madrassas built' or 'Taliban-run madrassas', I wouldn't have an issue, but as it is the use of the term carries the implication that all schools in the Arabic-speaking and Arabic influenced world are terrorist indoctrination centres...

In other debate observations - Castro must be pleased to see that he still ranks a mention as a threat to the US...
 

I have to say, I find Obama very hard to like. I do not understand what it is about him that has American liberals so fired up about him. His speeches seem vague and rarely seem to have a point, and he seems really uncomfortable when interacting with people one-on-one. ‘Hope’ and ‘change’ really don’t strike me as automatically positive things, unless you clarify what specifically you intend to change and why one should be optimistic. Hell, Bush is for those things, provided you define ‘hope’ as ‘blind ignorance to any negative events’ and prefix ‘change’ with ‘regime’…

I’m not saying he’s a terrible candidate or a horrible person, but for all I’ve seen of him, I’m not seeing anything special about him. If I was an American, sure, I’d vote for him – but only because he’s better than the Republican candidate, and that’s hardly a difficult achievement. I just find it truly bizarre how many American political commentators are extolling Obama’s apparently self-evident charisma, while I find him completely absent of that quality. It’s one thing to build a personality cult around a candidate, it’s quite another to build it around a candidate who seems completely lacking in personality…

It turns out that American publishers aren’t the only ones who make arbitrary changes to the titles of foreign books; Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? is retitled here as What’s the Matter with America?. It’s an understandable change; non-American readers are wondering what the hell is wrong with America in general, and don’t really care that much about Kansas specifically – but it leads to a frustrating read, as each chapter you expect Frank to discuss something other than Kansas; to extrapolate his conclusions to the rest of the country – and he never does, because the book is in fact, entirely about Kansas, as the original title makes clear.