0h No He Didn't !? (John Howard bites Obama and embarasses his country)

Well, I'd been leaving this go quiet after the midterms figuring it would take a while for the process to build enough for thoughts from across the pond to be even remotely interesting. Then John Howard went and opened his mouth.

In case you haven't heard Mr Howard bucketed Barrack Obama's deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq and suggested if he were Al Qaeda he would be praying for a Democrat to win the White House. Yikes!

To steal a line from Aaron Sorkin and CJ Gregg; firstly, I hardly know where to start, but firstly.

You just don't do that. To wade into an ally's (or anybody else's) internal politics in such a partisan way is outrageous, unacceptable, and just plain dumb.

Not only is this dumb and insulting in general but the realpolitik downsides are enormous. We now have an entire field of presidential candidates who will not give Mr Howard or Australia so much as the time of day if (as is likely) one of them becomes president. See Terry McAuliffe's comments for a brief taste.

So, can I say right off the bat, that I'm confident the vast majority of Australians are very embarrassed and not a little concerned. I think we can also be sure that a very large majority of Americans are wondering what the hell this Howard guy thinks he's doing.

So, I guess, what an observer over here may be able to contribute is some context (which is not be construed at any point as being within driving distance of an excuse, because there is none). I suspect there are two elements to this, one is electoral panic. Mr Howard is, as of this morning's papers, looking at some of the worst numbers of his career. His opponent, Kevin Rudd (in spite of looking like Harry Potter gone grey and sounding like your social studies teacher) is at 65% approval, the voting intention is running his way 58% to 42% and he's leading Howard as preferred Prime Minister by %48 to 42%. I realise it's not necessarily easy to get a sense of these numbers if you haven't been following Australian politics, but trust me, for Mr Howard, to use a technical term, they suck buckets.

Howard has been acting rattled for a few weeks now. He knows he's in trouble and he's thrashing around looking for traction. He thought he had it with a grand new $10 billion plan to fix up problems with inland rivers and water ( a huge issue here) but this morning's poll numbers have the opposition preferred on the environment by 60% to 22% (ouch). This may be partly because the opposition front man on the environment is none other than Peter Garrett. Yes, the Midnight Oil Peter Garrett. You remember him, bald, 7 feet tall and smarter than any 5 other rock stars put together.

The other factor driving Mr Howard to this folly is his obsequious relationship with the Bush administration. If Bush and Cheney are born to rule frat boys, then John Howard is the pathetic nerd gimp that is willing to do anything (and I mean the whole National Lampoon playbook) to be let into the fraternity. Cheney is visiting us next week and it's not outside the bounds of possibility that Howard though this was a good way to earn himself a pat on the head.

Anyway all I can say is we're really embarrassed and we'll be taking local electoral steps to correct this interruption to normal service as soon as possible.