With apologies to Howie and DWT readers, I've finally gotten caught up with his "Around the World" blog posts during his South America trip

Did you ever keep meaning to do something, and then keep meaning to do it, and finally keep meaning to do it so often that you didn't entirely realize you hadn't done it?

Afterward, you feel pretty stupid. So I feel duly stupid for not having realized, and thusly passed on the information to you, that Howie has indeed been blogging in his "Around the World" travel blog since the start of his South America trip. I guess I thought he would have written something about it to me--as he eventually did.

I had it in the back of my head to check there, just in case, and I kept meaning to, and . . . well, you know the rest.

Ironically, when I finally found the first post I reported here>, I did look below it, trying to figure out whether the previous post was also from the current trip. What I saw was something about how the people here don't like Bush, and I snap-decided on the basis of that that it must be an old post. Wrong!

The lesson here: Don't use "the world hates Bush" as a tool for establishing a date--or, anyway, for dating more precisely than "the 21st century."

Now, if you haven't read that particular post yet, a couple of chunks have lodged in my head to the point where I need to pass them on:

"All through the nightmare of Bush's illegitimate regime I have continued to travel. I have written about how uncomfortable people I've met have felt about Bush in Spain, in Turkey, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Morocco, Thailand, Canada, Mexico, England, Holland . . . And every year, the discomfiture has grown. After he re-stole the White House in 2004, the hatred started getting less subtle."


"I spent last night with some young Argentines who I met through my friend Tómas, a guy I've been in touch with via the Internet. Although Tómas' interest in politics is minimal, his friends are extremely interested. One, Maria, told me that American democracy, through thick and thin, has been a beacon of democracy for generations of Latin Americans. 'Now tyrants all over the world are learning something else than democracy from Bush. They learn to steal elections and undermine democracy.'

"Did Tony Blair use Bush's methods in the last U.K. election? Does anyone doubt Putin will in the next Russian election? The very legitimacy of democracy itself has been undermined by Bush, not just in our country, but around the world."

Something to think about, I think.