There's a kind of masochistic satisfaction to be had in reading Slate's roundup of the European media's response to Tuesday's Democratic victories, the gist of which was, "Took you long enough, you fucking idiots." But among the teeming tidal wave of mixed metaphors about what drove the last nail into the straw that broke the American voter-camel's back, one device stands out: the comparison of our Texan president to a Wild West gunslinger.

The Mirror said that the Democrats must 'use the US constitution to coral [sic] the cowboy,' while the Star declared that 'American voters have demonstrated a belated understanding of what people virtually everywhere else have known for years: George W. Bush is a dangerous cowboy who needs to be restrained.'

But one lone voice of quasi-dissent stands out among the rest: The Guardian's Simon Jenkins, who crowed that "The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neocon" has been laid to rest. Dear British people: ok, you are classier and better than us. But you will never understand our tired pop culture archetypes, so, like, don't even try. So there.
What Foreign Papers Said About The Midterm Elections [Slate]

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