Calling Mr. Martin... Calling Mr. Martin... Please fix your map!
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| Europe |
| Mark Steyn: I hate to rain on Europe |
| 2005-02-08 |
| I was very moved by the story of Mr Richard Kral, a Slovak gentleman found staggering drunk down a snowy trail a few days back. He'd been motoring through the Tatra Mountains in his Audi when he got buried by an avalanche. Opening the window and frantically clawing at the snow, he grasped that he couldn't dig his way out faster than the white stuff would come into the car and bury him. So he looked around and his eye fell on the 60 half-litre bottles of beer he happened to have with him. He had a drink and midway through realised that he could urinate on the snow to melt it. And he did: "Man Peed Way out of Avalanche," as one headline put it. "It was hard," the plucky Slovak told the local press, "and now my kidneys and liver hurt." I read that item on January 29. The next day Iraq voted and, scanning the coverage from Toronto to Sydney via Dublin, London, Paris and Berlin, I had an eerie sense of déjàvu. The Western media appear to have decided that any good news out of Iraq is one almighty neocon snow job and the only thing to do is emulate Mr Kral and urinate all over it. Alas, they've got a much tougher job. The snow is still coming down, and they've got nothing in the back of the car except the same watery beer they've been chugging for three years: "They Are Waiting for the Rivers of Blood," proclaimed the headline over Robert Fisk's column in the Independent, another classic for fans of the beloved comic genius to cut out and add to treasured clippings - such as his coverage of the Afghan war ("Bush Is Walking into a Trap") and his confident assertion that there were no Americans at Baghdad airport and that the blundering Yanks had merely stumbled upon an abandoned RAF airfield from the 1950s. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #8 Yes, what Mr. Jarhead said! |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-02-08 6:59:24 PM |
| #7 means to persevere through the lies and those that tell them, the ultimate truth always comes for all to see and vidicates the wronged. Or some shit like that. |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2005-02-08 5:31:47 PM |
| #6 Huh? |
| Posted by: Jules 187 2005-02-08 5:24:29 PM |
| #5 aaah yes - Kant didn't even understand himself... "Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; ere long she shall appear to vindicate thee." Seems to be in conflict with the above quote... |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-02-08 5:10:25 PM |
| #4 Damn straight, Angie! :) In fact, I can hear the strains of Euro anti-Americanism coming in faintly now, to the tune of Officer Krupke: "They're no good, they're no good, they're no earthly good, deep inside of them, they are no good!" (They MUST be talking about Americans.) But the "war on terror" is more accurately a race against time - to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they’re spending so much time doing so, they’ve left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about. Nicely said. |
| Posted by: Jules 187 2005-02-08 5:03:39 PM |
| #3 I hate to rain on Europe's parade... Liar. ...the traditional argument made by the Germans...that they're an ancient volk while the Americans are an artificial uncultured mongrel "half-degenerated sub-race" (Kant in 1775). Hey! Surely we must be fully degenerated by now! |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2005-02-08 4:58:19 PM |
| #2 Calling Mr. Martin... Calling Mr. Martin... Please fix your map! |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-02-08 1:45:37 PM |
| #1 ...the Canadian prime minister, a renowned sophisticate and indeed a fluent franco-phone, who last year declared in public that China was the most important nation in the Southern Hemisphere. Steyn, YOU RASCAL! And we think our educational system is broken... |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-02-08 1:43:29 PM |