An especially excellent post from the always excellent Belmont Club, on John Howard’s wonderful Australian victory:

The really horrifying thing about Howard’s victory for Labor is that it proves that packaging and spin are ultimately dead ends. It is a cul-de-sac lined with klieg lights and celebrity occasions, but there is no exit all the same because it is the platform of the Labor party that is rotten. The hodge-podge of wacky environmentalists, professional victims, special sexual pleaders etc. have laid a dead hand on attempts to regard any issue, like the War on Terror, with anything approaching common sense. How else to explain why Labor should offer a country of 20 million people, living in close proximity to Indonesia, the chance to downgrade their alliance with the United States.

If the Left were thinking clearly, it would realize that the single most striking aspect of George W. Bush is how ordinary he is. There is nothing in his strategy to combat terrorism beyond a refined common sense. He represents a threat to Liberalism for precisely the reason that an everyman reacting to an extraordinary historical challenge imperils kings and hereditary elites: the prospect he may discover by success in action that royalty with its cant and obscurantism is no better than he.

Let’s welcome back on to the world stage the man deemed intellectually inferior to all his Labor opponents; a person said to be singularly lacking in refinement and bereft of nuance. The man who for nearly ten years beat them all and has won another term. Australian Prime Minister John Howard.