A triple whammy

When i was at school in the UK, we were taught that the US constitution provided for checks and balances in the use and abuse of power, by splitting the functionality into three parts: the executive, legislative and judiciary.

Right now, the US is faced with a crisis of confidence in all three branches, at the highest level:

• The President and Vice President, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are almost definitely proven as liars, whose disregard for the truth has cost the lives of tens of thousands. The VP is also widely suspected of corruption and collusion on a massive scale. The president is, of course, almost universally seen as an idiot everywhere except the USA.
• The Majority Leader of the House, Tom DeLay, is likely to be indicted any day now on a variety of charges including coercion, bribery. He is generally regarded as a greedy, lying thug, even by members of his own party.
  
• Many of the Supreme Court justices are regarded as unsound in law and immoral in their practice (Justice scalia's friendship with the corrupt VP is a good example). The Attorney-General is an incompetent (0 for 5,000 in terrorism cases over 3 years!) and lunatic (draping a nude statue) fanatic (having himself "annointed" with cooking oil).

And the things they have in common? They're all Republicans, and they all believe in that peculiar brand of American Christianity which unilaterally asserts a moral superiority over the rest of the world, along with a nationalism which reminds us uncomfortably of fascism.

If these are traditional American values, I'm glad I am not a traditional American.