I know most here will disagree vehemently with this essay, but I thought it was interesting enough to forward along.  I'm much more a centrist than a leftie or rightie, so I'm in the these-days rare situation that I am intrigued by, and see varying degrees of merit in, perspectives from both sides.  My politics infuriate some and satisfy none, it seems.  ;-)  
 
Anyway, read the article for what it is, an unusually literate view from the right.  It is NOT being posted to start a flame war or to aggrivate our usually left-leaning membership.  Remember, I'm not promoting these views, I just found the perspective interesting.






A loss for civilisation
Mark Steyn | December 03, 2007 
ACCORDING to my Oz-watching pals in Britain and the US, John Howard is not a failure but a victim of his own success. He made Australia safe for the Labor Party: or, at any rate, safe enough that a sufficient number of bored electors were willing to take a flier on a house-trained Labor on the short leash of a quasi-Blairite leader.
That, at any rate, is the spin. Even if it's correct, and accepting that in parliamentary democracies even the greatest generals go a bridge too far, I regret Howard's end. True, I object in principle to Australia's gun laws, and I regard much of the Aussie economy as embarrassingly overregulated after a decade of supposedly conservative rule. But, as the former prime minister put it in one of his most famous soundbites, this is no time to be an 80 per cent ally. 
I am a 100 per cent ally of Howard.