Wise quacks

The best passage in President Bush’s penultimate State of the Union address on Tuesday was an admission of the transience of his own administration and of the newly composed Congress he was addressing. ‘The war on terror we fight today,’ he said, ‘is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.’ The many disappointments of the Bush presidency have already been chronicled. But the conflict into which the West was driven on 9/11 will long survive him, as it will Tony Blair’s premiership.

Confronted with a new and restless Congress, the President is the lamest of lame ducks. To say the least, he will have his work cut out between now and 20 January 2009, when the 44th President is inaugurated. His disastrous poll ratings match those of Nixon shortly before his resignation (how pointed that E. Howard Hunt, the shadowy ‘black ops’ figure at the heart of the Watergate break-in in 1972, should die on the very day that Mr Bush delivered his address).