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While I think Bush's going to win, hopefully easily, I certainly hope my favourite columnist wouldn't really quit if he loses. I suppose the fallback position is that he'll just quit the Irish Times, but still.

This makes me wonder if he's independently wealthy or something, because I know that if Mark Steyn tells the world he will quit, well, he will.

Thanks for posting this.

readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further.

He seems to be addressing his comments to that particular paper's readership while leaving out the other papers he writes for.

"Some US presidents are content to enjoy the perks of office and treat their term as one long holiday weekend (Clinton); others see their task as one of managing historically inevitable decline (Carter) or living with an unsatisfactory status quo (Eisenhower). But Bush, like Reagan, is a transformative president. By the time he leaves office in 2009, the world will be very different."

- Don't ya just love it. Historians will write volumes on each of these Presidencies, but Steyn tells you all you need to know about five of them in two sentences.
As for Steyn's promise to quit the Irish Times if Bush loses, I sense a certain loss of patience recently in his writing, especially for publications across the pond. Perhaps he's getting static from editors (Steyn reports that for the first time in his career, the London Daily Telegraph refused to publish his last column.); perhaps Steyn is getting a lot of hate mail from Irish readers, I don't know. However, he's clearly lost patience with the EU mindset, he's mad as hell, he's not going to take it anymore and he's putting it all on the line.

It doesn't really matter if Mark Steyn stops writing for 'The Irish Times'... 'The one man global content provider' can run, but he can't hide from his loyal readers ! Viva la internet !!

Mark Steyn is proof positive that Canada's pulse is still beating. Whether he writes about politics or stage & cinema, his columns are invariably witty and illuminating.

I loved this little history lesson:

Hitherto, if you wanted to become President of Afghanistan, you had to hang around till the incumbent’s term expired, which was generally when he did, usually at the next guy’s hand. King Zahir was deposed in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who was killed by his successor Taraki, who was suffocated by his successor Hafizullah Amin, who was executed by the Soviets, who installed Babrak Karmal, who died in a Moscow hospital but in a rare break with tradition managed to outlive his replacement, Najibullah, whom the Taliban wound up hanging from a traffic post. So, in a break with tradition, Hamid Karzai is now the first elected head of state in the country’s history.