<snip>
... but something politically important is happening in America. So many British people have raged against George Bush for so long now that most seem not to have noticed just how badly things are suddenly going for him. Yet the American revolt that Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo so signally failed to produce in last year's election may now in fact be taking shape.
There are multiple ingredients in the chemistry of this spike of disillusion - Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, next week's Tom DeLay prosecution, the White House's role in the Valerie Plame intelligence leak all among them. But don't mistake the sea change. Less than a third of Americans now tell the pollsters that their country is heading in the right direction. Bush's approval ratings recently slumped to 38%. Some Democrats even talk - but surely prematurely - of a country ready for electoral upheaval in the midterms a year from now.
<snip>
The current spectacle in Washington of the head of the executive branch trying to push an unsuitable woman candidate into a senior judicial position for political reasons may seem to belong to an entirely different constitutional system to our own. But somewhere down the line a similar crisis awaits us too. The politics of the British row will be very different from those of the American one. In the end, though, it will come down to the same issue: the executive trying to select the judges. When that confrontation comes, it could be just as questionable and damaging as the Miers nomination is proving to be for Bush.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1598261,00.html
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