It is exasperating listening to the news as we approach this most important election. The coverage is all about comparing the length of the candidate's sentences. How many big words do they use? Who's on Leno or Letterman? Whose jaw is more like Richard Nixon's, rather than whose deceptions... In resolving these pressing issues, cameras are breathlessly focused upon the inscrutable thought processes of the latest pollster chimera, the Republican-leaning, formerly staunchly Democratic blue-collar "security mom." Since she is a statistically average but politically swinging kind of girl, she is a much sought-after media date. Journalists are stationed in coffee shops and Wal-Marts across America hoping to flush her out and capture her angst about which man is manly enough to guarantee her children a place on the planet. The three-second soundbites, alas, always make her sound like Olive Oyl trying to decide between Brutus and Popeye.

There is no such angst beyond our borders. With near unanimity, newspapers around the world--even the most conservative end of the British press--are wondering what is going on in the inscrutable thought processes of Donald Rumsfeld. The elections in Iraq may be "not quite perfect," he says; it wouldn't matter to him if parts of that country were not included because of the ongoing violence. Indeed, opines Rumsfeld, some American cities are as dangerous as some parts of Iraq, and hell, we carry on with our elections.

While we are left to surmise, with some apprehension, which American cities are so dangerously imperfect as to risk being left behind, the international media ponder the upside-down, if sunny-side-up priorities in George W. Bush's speech to the United Nations. They worry about the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare as a dangerous model and legally unprecedented global standard. They focus on the ideological inconsistencies behind American neoconservatives' endorsement of "freedom" without stability in Iraq, of "justice" without regard for conventions against torture and of "democracy" without human rights.

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