I was reading a news item in the Guardian the other day. Didn't get very far. This was the first sentence: "The Church of England said yesterday that police counter-terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them."
At that point, I fell off the chair, howling with laughter. Not because of the strikingly non-ecumenical character of the infanticidal thugs at Beslan, the bombers of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the murderers of the 12 Nepalese workers, the terrorist suspects arrested in north London on Friday, or the beheaders of two American hostages and impending beheader of a third British one.
No, what's hilarious about the C of E's intervention is that it felt the need to make it.
Posted by: tipper ||
09/28/2004 4:05:11 AM ||
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#1
Uh-oh. Hope Aris doesn't read this one.
He hates it when someone disses his beloved EU. ;-)
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
09/28/2004 15:38 Comments ||
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#2
This line
That's modern Europe, with its head in the sand but convinced that it's the only one holding the map the right way...,
not arrogance on America's part, sums up nicely why Americans aren't jumping on the bandwagon of the EU parade. It's too bad; we have a shared history. We might well have been sitting here today with the same optimism about the EU as Europeans have, had there been a bit less posturing and a bit more responsibility for the state of the world demonstrated by our old friends.
George Bush is up 8+ points in the polls because the reconstituted liberal pulp served up by big brother Europe is a breakfast we stopped eating a long time ago.
#3
A much better line:
"If the core of European identity turns out to have made you impotent, you ought to treat the disease rather than demand free Viagra from Washington."
Now if that don't describe Euro-American politics and economics for the past 100 years!
#4
Barbara, I read it before you even posted. But it doesn't contain anything much worth answering to -- a mass of jokes pretending to be making a point but just reiterating cliches and assumptions instead. It wouldn't convince anyone who isn't already convinced.
Have seen much more meaningful attacks on the EU, and ones that are more structurally coherent as well.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/28/2004 22:10 Comments ||
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#6
Mark Steyn always makes for entertaining reading.
Unfortunately he really doesn't have a clue about the EU.
What has the EU to do with the rising number of Muslims in the UK (which are a heritage of the British colonies).
What has the EU to do with the fact that the British don't have enough babies?
Who forces the British to adopt Swedish tax rates (which for the average worker aren't really higher than anywhere else)
Who forces the British to work 35 hours a week (btw nobody works that few hours as a full time job in Europe these days).
And why does Mr Steyn systematically ignore that many EU states have already embarked on painful reforms cutting the welfare system to sustainable levels?
Free Viagra from Washington? Cialis is an European product and has less side effects :-)
Hat Tip : Real Clear PoliticsI don't often want to post columnists, but this is just too good! Our favorite lefty skewers Nurse Fuzzy-Wuzzy with a sharp scalpel The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Christopher Hitchens
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable... And typically Fuzzy and Wuzzy...
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame... Mr. Hitchens, with his usual liberal associates, doesn't know what all us folks of the center-right, right, and libertarian ilk know; Prez. Bush had Rummy transport Osama's body from Tora-Bora to Area 51, and it is in cold storage next to the Roswell aliens from 1947...{snicker}{snicker}
I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida. Our favorite lefty nails it again...
Posted by: BigEd ||
09/28/2004 11:04:59 AM ||
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Dems are hitting rock bottom. This incoherence can't last much longer. Either McAuliffe, Lockhart and the other idiots will be bounced, and old hands like Biden and Holbrooke will take charge, or else the current big tent will collapse and the party will recreate itself as a Mikey 'n' Jimmuh-style, isolationist, openly leftist party pushing an inward-looking, anti-globalization foreign policy agenda.
#2
...Which will be very bad for America. You really don't want your political middle-ground thundering left towards something like, say, that of any Euro state...
#3
Lol! BD, if the lemmings go far enough left, they'll be in the Pacific... Any ocean will do, actually. We just have to steer them the last half-klik or so, to make sure there's a nice high cliff... The view, you understand, it's the view we want to make sure they don't miss as they go over. Just another service we provide to our loonies. You have Dover, right? Wanna share methodologies?
#4
The weird thing is the way the party's leaders, after Dean's surge, began to adopt the rhetorical posture of the Kos/Mikey crowd--consipracy-mongering, furreigner-bashing dressed up as anti-capitalism...
Apparently Dean's ability to raise so much $$$ in rapid order and totally outside the party hierarchy must have scared the party heavies into thinking they had to pander to the Kos wackos without bothering to think through the ramifications. Hence the ridiculously incoherent messages, all over the map, from teh campaign each week.
#5
The majority party for the last century and longer, if one believes Mead, adopts internationalism. Isolationism is the clear alternative to internationalism. It is the position to which a permanent minority party gravitates. The Democrats will be the permanent minority party until they shed their current leadership and begin to have new ideaqs that challenge the new majority that has not yet gone stale.
This may take longer than lex expects. I think all the Vietnam protesters will have to be removed from positions of power in the party before this happens, either through age or election. One of the disadvantages of the gerymandered districts we now have is that election is a much less effective tool for removing obsolete politicians than it once was.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
09/28/2004 17:09 Comments ||
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Perhaps. But the Iraq War and the asymmetric threat both make it very difficult for Americans to maintain a clear distinction btn internationalism and isolationism. US isolationists tend to suspect dark internationalist conspiracies-- "limeys", "reds," trilateralists 'n' black helicopters, saudis 'n' halliburton 'n' carlyle, etc. Some of these narratives were at least consistent and had some resonance with mainstream policy: Roosevelt did indeed seek to unwind the British Empire, and Truman did indeed seek to contain the SU. Plenty of Americans find the UN a joke.
But the saudi meme falls apart. The Iraq war can't be made to fit the pattern: the saudis opposed it, as did Kofi, and it was the French who bartered (Iraqi) blood for (TotalFinaElf) oil contracts. No one outside of the DU morons seriously believes that the Iraq War was "about oil."
The same confusion applies to Russia and France. Americans know that France is not an ally and that Russia's no longer an enemy. Beyond that, the isos and conspiracy-mongers can't fit these nations into any plausible or coherent scheme.
The same Dems who are most likely to go hard isolationist are also the ones mumbling pro-UN platitudes about "multilateralism."
As to timing, who knows? OTOH there are plenty of Vietnam-generation Dem leaders who remain reasonably sane and hawkish: Biden, Gephardt, Holbrooke, Gary Hart, and Lieberman.
OTOH these types and their world-view don't resonate with the new activists mobilized by Dean, Mikey, Soros et al. Those activists tend not to care much about foreign policy at all, let alone security; they tend to be parochial warriors whose notion of cosmic conflict is Franken vs Limbaugh. Let's reserve judgment till we see who replaces McAuliffe.
#7
I really think that they are about two election cycles from total meltdown. I was watching Dean on TV yesterday and my daughter said he looked "Scarry." Truly they all look mental; from time to time. You can't stay a majority party when your candidates scare teenagers. When my daughter gets ready to vote (4 years) she will remember the scray guy/gal. Think of a Democrat that hasn't put on a scary (angry) face during this election cycle. And that what the Dems have become, the party of fear and loathing.
#8
Agreed. When a screamer is your party's most viable candidate, there's something deeply wrong.
Blame it on Trippi and the deanforamerica.com meetups.
Imagine that a million black helicopter types suddenly pumped $100 million into a campaign for Pat Buchanan and you get a sense of how the Dems have been nuked by Mikey n Markos and co.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
