Know Your Enemy

"When [my friends and I] meet up for dinner we do our best to take up other subjects - books, gossip, movies, our children - but then, like the addicts we've become, we sneak back to the drug of outrage, shooting up the latest bare-faced lie and squalid revelation, not forgetting to list yet again the national and global catastrophes brought about by the incompetence, hypocrisy, muddleheadedness, venality, truculence, mendacity, callousness, zealotry, machismo, lawlessness, cynicism, wishful thinking, and occasional downright evil of the administration of George W Bush. Our economy is in freefall, our public school system a disgrace, our military exhausted, the wounded and traumatised dying of neglect, yea, the very earth groaning for relief - and he's optimistic! Yessiree! Looking forward to it! Leaning toward us over the podium with that exasperated little squint and that impatient, dentist-drill voice, utterly at a loss as to how he got saddled with a nation of such gloomy Guses and crybabies".

On the eve of Barack Obama's election Tobias Wolff bids a fond farewell to Dubya, one of seven US authors to reflect on the outgoing president's legacy for the Observer.

Last week I commented on how difficult it might be for Obama to translate the ideals that got him elected into practice, and how difficult it might be for one man to set the US on a different course. Well, here's a good test case: will an Obama-led US support an internationally binding Arms Trade Treaty? 147 states are pushing for it, with only the US and fellow rogue state Zimbabwe having voted against it in a ballot at the UN.

Update: You can add this to Obama's to do (or to try and do) list - Amnesty's checklist of tasks for his first 100 days in office. Their thinking, rightly, is that they need to strike while the iron's hot. It's optimistic to think that he might be able to overturn the Bush administration's policies with regard to illegal detention, torture and extraordinary renditions, particularly in that short space of time, but nothing ever changed without ambitions and goals.