Republicans are astonished and, in some cases, sickened by the ‘lurch to the left’ that America made by voting for Barack Obama. To them, I say: don’t be silly.

If anything, it is a correction, a very logical reaction to a process started in 2000, when a true ‘lurch to the right’ was rammed down the electorate’s throat. Obama’s election is a belated response to the election of Bush.

Each action begets a reaction. A positive action usually begets a positive response – and a negative action more often than not elicits a negative reaction.

On some network during election night, some analyst at some point voiced his astonishment about “how America seems to be abandoning its history of centrist politics”. I was appalled; here was a guy whose name I had never heard of, but who was a full-time paid analyst, and who somehow missed that in 2000, a man who said that he would unite the country, who promised that he was not a divider, started an ideological divide the likes of which no one had seen since the days of Barry Goldwater.

George W. Bush veered off wildly to the extreme right, on a quest to appease only the ultra-conservative, yes even extreme wing of the Republican religious wingnuts. In 2004, when so many people already had enough of that lurch that came to them like a thief in the night, many were swayed to vote for Bush again out of fear for terrorists. Bush was re-elected by the thinnest of margins.

That should have humbled him, but it didn’t.

Where was Fred Barnes of the Wall Street Journal back in those days, in 2000 and 2004, to accuse America of ‘lurching to the right‘? Robert Novak, on the day after the election of Barack Obama, wrote that Obama has “no mandate”. By the time of this writing, Obama has 349 votes in the electoral college.

What constitutes a “landslide” in Robert Novak’s dimension? Or even a mandate? Where was Novak in 2000 and 2004, to accuse Bush of not having a mandate, even though Bush had barely eeked out a win with 286 seats in 2004 – and even after having to resort to calling in the aid of the Supreme Court in 2000?

The answer is, of course, that Barnes and Novak felt pretty much at ease with whatever Bush was doing. But in 2008, a vast majority of the US electorate felt that they had to change course. The ship had veered off too much to starboard.

So the voters voted for a correction, and bringing the country back on course. If anything, the change Obama is seeking doesn’t seem too radical. Yes, universal health care is, in light of US history, a historical and possibly even ‘radical’ departure from the (supposedly) centrist course. But as for the rest of his platform, I’m convinced that not the slogan ‘change we can believe in’ but rather ‘a return to the way we were’ would have been more to the point.

What is so terrible about that? I wish Barnes and Novak would read this, and answer that question.

But they won’t. It’s probably a good thing that Obama’s quest for ‘new, uniting politics’ can do without the likes of Barnes and Novak. I wish them well while they lower themselves into the dustbin of history, where ‘old politics’ has been languishing for a good 24 hours already.

Yes, Robert Mugabe, dictator-for-life of Zimbabwe, is an evil man. He lives up to just about every benchmark George W Bush and Tony Blair once set for being part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. Saddam Hussein was removed as leader of Iraq for being an evil man. (When the WMD-issue fell through, of course, but still.) Robert Mugabe, however, is still leader of his nation and it doesn’t look like he’ll be ousted anytime soon. Instead, European leaders in Lisbon in the past days stumbled over each other to find enough microphones in order to shout down Mugabe. Without one hint of irony they lambasted him for being a cruel, evil dictator who has created massive inflation and uses every violent means available to him to repress and kill Zimbabweans. At least the EU leaders had the gall to beat up on the little guy.

Imagine a nation with an inflation that seems virtually unstoppable, and where the people have to struggle day by day in order to be able to buy food. In fact, imagine food shortages. Imagine that only a small part of the people living in the cities is able to buy a bit more than the day-to-day groceries, while much of the rest of the population is impoverished, hardly able to get medical care for themselves or their children. They have a choice between working 16 hours for $0,50 or 12 hours for some food, and perhaps — once a month — some clothes.

Imagine the (tribal) minorities in that nation being repressed by violence, as the police and the army are firmly controlled by a fearsome powermachine that will not let anybody get close enough to power to even smell it. Imagine that even the smallest form of dissent is crushed by blinding force, usually following betrayal because the powermachine’s secret informants network is omnipresent, much like the StaSi intelligence service of the former East-German communist republic, where every 3rd person you knew was a government collaborator.

Now imagine the world’s leaders taking a stance against that country. Imagine the leaders of all the EU nations lining up behind a microphone to criticise that government in the harshest of tones. Imagine EU leaders calling that nation’s leadership “criminal”, “repressive”, “dictatorial”. Having read the above, you’d think those world leaders would have every right to publicly bash that corrupt nation’s leadership.

And now imagine that country not being Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Instead, imagine it is China.

Indeed: you can’t imagine it. Yes, you can probably imagine all the bad things I mentioned above, and associate them with China in one go, as much of what Robert Mugabe is being chastised for is exactly what the Chinese ‘communist’ government is doing to its own people. Entire housing blocks are being demolished as we speak, just to create room for new apartments and sports facilities. The inhabitants of the old demolished, impoverished sheds? The government doesn’t care where they go, as long as they keep working in the Western factories.

So, I’m curious: when will the leaders of the world line up behind a microphone to denounce China’s regime for all it is doing to its own people, and those that are not “its” people, such as the Tibetans?