Like so much about the Mideast, what the North American media and our politicians tell us about the current agony of Gaza leaves out more than it includes, and paints a badly distorted picture.

2008, to borrow the pithy phrase of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, has been an `annus horibilis.’ A propos, 2009 might be a good time for the old lady to give up the throne and cede it to her poor, long-suffering, 60-year old son, Prince Charles. What is she waiting for? His 80th birthday?

Before we discuss what’s left of the economy, a few words about one brave man. The shoes Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi threw at George Bush in Baghdad had more courage and truth in them than all the honeyed, sycophantic words of America’s fawning media.

The respected US strategic think tank, RAND Corp, estimated that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would initially kill two million people, wound 100 million, and send clouds of radioactive dust around the globe.

The esteemed American poet Carl Sandburg perfectly captured the spirit and power of Chicago: `Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat…Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.’

The attack on Mumbai last week is being called `India’s 9/11,’ and rightly so. Like the bumbling Bush administration, India’s government ignored warnings of impending attack and reacted with confusion and ineptitude.

`Pirates of the Caribbean’ and cute little Johnny Depp they are not. Somalia’s pirates tote AK-47’s and RPG rockets, chew the narcotic shrub qat, use satellite cell phones for their negotiations, and are just about the only people in strife-ravaged Somalia these days who have a regular job.

Much of the Western world just honored the millions of soldiers fallen in the two world wars. But we also need to look beyond post-war myths and understand the tragic political mistakes that sent these soldiers to die in wars that might have been avoided.

Americans did not `liberate’ Iraq, but they certainly liberated their own nation last week by sweeping the Republican Party from power. One prays America’s long nightmare of foreign aggressions, fear, religious extremism, and flirting with neo-fascism is finally at an end.

America has hopefully left the dark period of post-9/11 `temporary madness,’ to use the words of writer John Le Carré, and is re-emerging into the daylight. The grim era of President George W. Bush and his mentor (and real president), VP Dick Cheney, is at an end.