Has-been

n. Informal. One that is no longer famous, popular, successful or useful.

Phillip Adams in the Saturday Australian:

Behold the phenomenon of what’s being called one-legged democracy.

In the US, we have a president who’s unchallenged and, it would seem, unchallengeable. As well as controlling the world’s mightiest military machine, he has the Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the media and the conservative Christians under his thumb. The only institutions rivalling his presidency and power – the great corporations (and the ultra-wealthy who control them) – are so delighted by his tax cuts that they’d like to keep him in the White House forever. Wait for murmuring about a third term – justified by the perils of the “war against terror”.

And since 9/11, home security legislation has given the president unprecedented powers, rolling back the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and vanquishing the hard-won victories of decades of activism and the 1960s civil rights movement. Less and less a democracy, not quite a dictatorship, the US has a wilfully ignorant electorate eager to vote against self-interest. So let’s call it what it is: the world’s first dumbocracy.

Read the whole things folks. Sad, yet really, really funny.