“We just want the misery to end,” says one European diplomat.

[RedEarth]

Moving Right Along

While Republicans abandon him at home, the rest of the world is preparing for the era beyond Bush. What the next president should do to repair the breach between Washington and the world.

Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 2 hours, 51 minutes ago


July 12, 2007 - While the White House desperately tries to save George W. Bush’s “legacy,” the rest of the world is putting it behind them. In capitals around the globe, Bush is already a lame, indeed mortally wounded, duck. And in government offices where U.S. policy can still tilt the fate of nations—that’s most places—the 2008 presidential race is being watched like the World Cup.

..........

Normally a president with 18 months left doesn’t have to be a lame duck. But Bush is now stalemated on so many fronts—the Mideast, Iraq, Lebanon, reducing the budget deficit, opening up trade (there is one hopeful exception at the moment: denuclearizing North Korea)—that the likelihood he can achieve a breakthrough is vanishing. Just as important, he doesn’t have a vice president who’s trying to succeed him, and his own party is abandoning him in the most humiliating way on Iraq. The sense one gets in many foreign capitals, as well as in Washington, is that people are just waiting for it all to be over, so they can begin to pick the country and the global system out of the rubble. “We just want the misery to end,” says one European diplomat.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19731336/site/newsweek

[applegrove]

1. That is powerful. And so true.

[snappyturtle]

2. So true...we all want it to come to an end.

However, to say * is a lame duck is only a hopeful thought. With signing statements and the power of the veto and the Supreme Court in his pocket, * isn't lame enough for me.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Time for you to go, Grasshopper. nt

[melody]

4. THEY want the misery to come to an end?

Some of us have been in that place for seven miserable years.