Speaking of political bias . . .

I confess I am stonkered at the willingness to blame the Bush administration for being insufficiently active on Doha, since without the trade team's efforts, Doha would not be on life support; it would be dead. The Bush administration did everything but a fan dance to lure all parties back to the table after the catastrophe at Cancun, and while it has not gone as far on farm subsidies as anyone would like, this is widely regarded as driven by (Democratic and Republican) farm interests in Congress, not some failure on the administration's part. It does the administration no good to negotiate a treaty that can't be signed.

How, exactly, would more efforts from the Bush administration have, say, overcome the farm interests in Congress, or the much more egregious European intransigence on the matter? While the bilateral deals are worse than multilateral deals, they are better than nothing, which unfortunately is what seems to be on offer from the EU and the G[n] group of developing nations who have banded together to attempt to beat a better deal out of the west.

The Bush administration is far from perfect on trade; I think particularly of its ridiculous stance on sugar ethanol. But the Bush administration is constrained by political realities. It has failed to take many damaging steps despite intense political pressure, such as declaring China a currency manipulator, and where it does impose anti-trade measures, they are pleasingly often something like the steel tariffs, which were guaranteed to be overruled by the WTO. And as Mr DeLong's commenters point out, whatever Mr Bush's trade sins, they are at this point thoroughly overshadowed by the Democratic protectionists currently flexing their muscles in the House. That's less an endorsement of the Bush administration than a sad comment on the state of trade policy in the world today: the Bush administration is the best we've got.

Precisely. Pointing out the failings of the current US administration can be useful, but only when the even worse failings of the available alternatives are considered as well. Failing to do so makes the world a worse place, and does so for the spurious purpose of advancing competing political groups.

I'm often disappointed to hear people that seem to be good hearted and level headed engage in such transparently ridiculous political boosterism. Worse, when confronted, they defend the behavior with what amounts to an "everyone does it" argument.

This post is related to the previous one . . . and gives me an opportunity to quote someone who used the word stonkered.