The US threat to Australia

To his credit, Tim Dunlop disagrees with John Quiggin's notion that the US is as big a threat to Australia as is al Qaeda:

I don't see the comparison at all. While the Bush administration (as opposed to "America") is a menance in many ways, they have no intention of randomly nuking Australian cities. Al Qaeda and co. would be happy to.

John Quiggin has had second thoughts and has modified his position slightly:

In the comments thread at Crooked Timber, Katherine observes, correctly I think, that arguments about moral equivalence are counterproductive. As she says ’“Are we better or worse than Zarqawi and Bin Laden” is the debate people like James Inhofe and George W. Bush want us to have. ” So, I shouldn’t have said “equally awful” above. But what is being done is awful, and such things are contributing greatly to the fear of US foreign policy I referred to.

So, it seems common sense has prevailed. Wrong. Here's Aussie Bob in comments at Tim Dunlop's:

Australians have an uneasy feeling about Americans. They see them as generally loud-mouthed, club-footed drongos with more money than sense. It is like this, and has always been.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, the Abu Graib torturers, the conniving pharmaceutical companies twisting our arm, the arms peddlars, the hypocritical religious wackos, the gun-happy maniacs murdering each other at ten times the rate of anywhere else in the civilized world, the polluters, the executioners, the manifest destiniers with their hands on their hearts, the whole lot of them barging around the world as if they own it, lock, stock and barrel can not, and will not be allowed to continue their march to glory (their own glory) for much longer by the long-suffering, relatively civilized rest of us.

At last Australia has woken up: Al Qaeda will never be able to wipe us all off the face of the planet.

It's the maniacs in Washington we really need to worry about.

If Aussie Bob lived in my neighbourhood, I'd be too worried about the stuff swirling around in his head to give al Qaeda or the US a thought. Hell, it's plenty worrying just being in the same country with him.