World reaction to American election

#juan said:

Never in recent memory have Europeans been so devoted to the outcome of a midterm U.S. election. While presidential contests are watched with great interest, the fates of senators and representatives usually fly far below the radar of a continent that itself holds a major election almost every week.
But this one is different. It is, as Le Monde said in the editorial accompanying a thick special section this weekend devoted to the election, "a referendum for or against the policies of George W. Bush."
And if one thing unites Europeans these days, it is opposition to Mr. Bush.

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Colpy said:

What motivates Europe is opposition to the United States.....France and Germany suffer from a serious case of envy......both think THEY should run the world, and behave childishly whenever the Superpower is involved.

That said, I too am somewhat pleased about the election. The Bush administration needed a strong set of brakes applied.......not to their foreign policy, but to domestic policy.

I have no tolerance for "anti-terror" legislation that makes a mockery of basic legal rights.

As well, the level of deficit spending by the US gov't is insane.

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The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.
The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that the deletions were “consistent with the principle that proliferation-sensitive information should not be released.”
In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. “It’s a cookbook,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.”
The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.
Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms scientist now at the war studies department of King’s College, London, called the posted material “very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data.”
Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said “some things in these documents would be helpful” to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

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ottawabill said:

HERE HERE!!!

total agreement!!

The adminstration will not fall apart from this but we are finally back to a proper checks and balances Government. The pull from Iraq will NOT happen but nor will free spending without a plan of action occur.

Democrats are not always good for Canada (protectionist) but they will be great to ask the hard questions that have not been asked for the entire Bush Admin.

It has also left a very bad taste with me about the terror laws...Seeming to be more like the USSR disguized as Freedom....Build a wall around to Mexico to keep us safe....Isn't that what the East Germans said?

Tell you closest friend and trading partner to show a passport..the are shutting themselves in..and I don't like it..what happened to U.S. friend of the free world??? eh

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EagleSmack said:

I think you are stretching what is really going on though. Since the Patriot Act my life has not changed one bit. Not one. I do not have anybody tailing me, I am not stopped in the streets by secret police checking for my ID. This is just liberal scare tactics. My liberty has not been affected at all.

Probably because I am not a criminal or a terrorist.

We are building a fence on the Mexican border to keep THOUSANDS of illegal aliens out. I can tell you right now, if you had an impovershed (sic) country that was flooding Canada you would want it to stop as well. Illegal immigration is a huge problem here so it is easy for you to look over the fence and say

"Hey America... why are you being so mean? Let them in."

They aren't coming in your yard like they are ours.

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#juan said:

while others foresaw a greater emphasis on trade policy

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Gonzo said:

I think the United States is traditionally protectionist country.
I dont understand how Americans can be angry at their president now and not years ago. The whole world saw the errors Bush was making, but he got re-elected. You get what you deserve.

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