Sure. And yesterday the Mail (UK) had a front page banner headline "What a Mickey Mouse Way to Run a Country".
It's more than just schadenfreude. Underneath the resentment of the USA's hegemonic position in the world is an awareness that the institutional corruption of US politics corrupts the politics of the world.
As the Primary Process has developed technologically, and intensified over the last 50 years, people from other countries have seen what are for them unbelievable sums of money being spent on the competition between rather similar candidates.
This is coupled with images of superficiality and provincialism. There is a strong streak of backwoods (and backwards) provincialism in populist appeals in the US. The reaction of the European intelligentsia is not just cultural snobbery, though it certainly includes that.
The strata with further education in an area like Europe are horrified at the barbarity of US politics that the death penalty is rampant.
The chain of school massacres, although not unique to the USA, are seen as linked to the barbaric power of the gun firms.
It is true that vibrant populist democracies at home are often linked with imperialist barbarity abroad, and in some respects the USA has more bourgeois democratic norms than some other countries. But there is a powerful case that its democratic deficiencies have a major indirect impact on the world.
The current partly accidental events, but also not at all accidental events, are a major blow to the global agenda of finance capitalism headed by the USA to impose bourgeois democratic norms *uniformly* on all countries of the world, with the maximum free trade for finance capital.
This loss of authority, expressed mockingly in the article Doug forwarded, is a serious obstacle to this agenda. Finance Capital in the USA now has an objective interest in radical consitutional reform, and should prevail in any contest over smaller backward areas of capital like gun control, and tobacco.
How radicals and genuine democrats (with a small "d") can develop a programme to extend democratic norms so that they are really reflective of the life or ordinary working people, is a major strategic task that perhaps the internet can help.
Not least in tackling the appallingly low registration figures for participation in the right to vote.
Those of us who are not citizens of the USA expect it of you. Do we now all know each other enough to be able to be that explicit?
Chris Burford
London