Europe Stews in Its Own Bile

Here’s The Guardian’s lament for a country it pretends not to have always hated.

Those outside America, in the chanceries of Europe and beyond, who hoped that this would be a passing phase, like a Florida hurricane that wreaks havoc only to blow over, will instead have to adjust to a different reality.

Don’t you just hate how arrogant those Yanks are?

Would it be possible to load more Euro-sneer into a single sentence? We all know how funny hurricanes are, especially when they blow away those Republicans and their trailer houses. I guess all those shell-pocked, squatter-infested, cabbage-whiff tenements in Berlin count as chanceries. Just like those coal-smoked indoostrial rowhouses in Newcastle.

Sher gotta be fancy livin’ over yonder in Yoo-rup.

For four years many hoped that the course charted by President Bush – a muscular go-it-alone view of a world divided between the forces of darkness and those of light – would prove to be a blip. Come November 2, 2004, they wanted to believe, normal service would be resumed. The United States would return to the old way of doing business, in concert with allies and with respect for the international system the US itself had done so much to create. The norms of foreign policy pursued by every president from Roosevelt to Clinton, including the first George Bush, would be revived. Senator Kerry promised as much.

Yes. We’re going it alone with Japan, Poland, Australia, England, Bulgaria, Portugal, and half the freaking planet. Even Francegermany has made a token contribution in Afghanistan; even Russia has joined the Proliferation Security Initiative. Interesting how the same people who decry our mythical unilateralism in Iraq are (1) mainly holding a lot of checks drawn on the Bank of Saddam, and (2) strangely eager for America to deal unilaterally with North Korea. How odd.

My favorite is The Guardian’s disingenuous invocation of all America’s presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton. Of course, none of those presidents, including Roosevelt, faced the realistic possibility of a deliberate mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil. All of them were dealing with security contexts that were either completely alien to modern reality or, in the case of Clinton, to the reality of the time. And let’s remember that when they were in office, The Guardian hated them all, because they were American, too. Because deep inside, The Guardian’s editors know that it is the “normal service” from the unwashed, uncouth American boys with the guns that frees them to blather as they do.

They’ll never forgive us for that.