Old Rummy's gone, and Bush must be burning!

I don't understand the American political system.
That shouldn't be a surprise: I don't claim to understand the Canadian political system, either. But these midterm Congressional elections have me puzzled...
...they're midterm, for one thing. That's odd. I mean, isn't a "term" the period of time that elected officials serve? Checking further, I find that the political term in the U.S. lower house is just two years. Wow. Hard to believe anything gets done in that short a time.
In this case, surprising absolutely nobody, the Democrats have regained control of the House of Representatives. So far as I can guess, that's like Stephen Harper being the only Conservative amongst a sea of Liberals. How that would work I have no idea, and likewise I can't imagine how Bush is even supposed to pretend to govern, now. (Yeah, yeah, I know, he's been pretending to govern for six years now, rimshot!)
I tried to explain to my wife, who couldn't care less about most things political, that this was sort of the equivalent of Bush's majority being shaved to a razor thin minority. But that doesn't even come close to illustrating the paralysis I think the U.S. government will fall victim to, especially if, as looks likely, the Dems will control the Senate, too.

Don't get me wrong...it's hard to see this as anything other than a resounding positive development for America and the world. Even some of Bush's staunchest supporters have made tracks away from the President. We've all been treated to his fiasco of a foreign policy, but--not so well known here in the Great White North--the perception is that Bush's domestic policy has not been much better. Fiscal conservatives have lamented his spending, which is, to put it charitably, out of control. Social liberals have a host of bones to pick with Bush, wondering just what it is he's got against homosexuals, when science will get its at-bats in American classrooms, and how many more laws his administration might deem it prudent to create.

All but the most partisan, my-country-do-or-die types should be able to admit to themselves that by any measure George W. Bush has been a failure as a President. There is a strong whiff of schadenfreude emanating out of just about everywhere, watching Rumsfeld resign. Here in Canada, where many of us are viscerally anti-American at the best of times, we should take pains to recall that even the roughly half of Americans who voted for Bush--twice--likely had no idea what that would entail. A country is not its government, much as we'd like to pretend otherwise.
Also, this is not entirely a welcome development for Canada--which has nothing to do, incidentally, with our PM. The howling of the Canadian media aside, Harper is not Little Bush. Our conservatives here (with the exception of a few true-blue Tories) would pass for Democrats in most American states. There's no American party analogous to our Liberals, and I suspect an NDP policy document read in America would bring Joe McCarthy raving up from his grave.
No, the reason this Democrat victory could spell a spot of trouble is that Dems are notorious protectionists. It's quite likely the softwood lumber deal will be blithely torn up, now. There are a subset of Canadians, mostly of the Dipper persuasion, who think this is a good thing. Unfortunately, they're wrong: that deal, though flawed, is a damn sight better than the state of affairs that persisted for years before it was signed.
There may be more economic hiccups coming. It does seem a small price to pay to teach the most powerful man in the world that power has its limits.