First, it’s nice to see someone with longer run-on sentences than ours. We grew an Osama beard getting through the first paragraph/sentence.

Second, the front page Reuters advert for this article promised, but the article didn’t deliver: “It’s easy to dismiss his over-the-top vitriol, but leaders and candidates across the globe are increasingly relying on heated rhetoric over productive analysis.”

We were hoping to hear some constructive message about how our political dialogue has coarsened and some encouragement to get it back to Leave it to Beaver-day issues. Instead we got a rehash of what we’ve already read in the last week/month/year/years, and a bashing one at that. Isn’t it a little naive to complain about nasty election rhetoric in some place that used to be a totalitarian dictatorship?

Three cheers for Komrad Putin, that commie Siberian tiger castrator, for even going through the electoral motions. We long for the day the Chinese elections have such nasty lying guys trying to sway a voter or two.

You can tell from their speeches that those Republicans would be mortally offended if the French, the Chinese or the Venezuelans respected them. They derive their sense of pride from the fact that people in these countries don’t respect them. United Russia would similarly be horrified if the US or the UK respected it.

So: whose respect do all these guys actually want?