Love the Economist

They do snark like very few others in major publishing:



German magazine Der Spiegel offers similar sentiments in summing up President Bush's recent interview with one of Germany's most well-known TV reporters:

Sabine Christiansen, who asks George W. Bush about one pressing global issue after another -- and who is relatively insistent when it comes to human rights issues -- isn't really talking to the most powerful man in the world at all. In the spring of 2006, one-and-a-half years after Bush's triumphant re-election, she may in fact be speaking to the most powerless US president of all time.

In the past 60 years, only one American president had worse poll ratings 18 months after his election: Richard Nixon at the end of his stint in office. Bush could safely ignore those polls if everything else were okay -- but at the moment nothing is. For some time now, the president has become an observer of his own political decline.