the Stupid Chicago Sun Times Article by Mark Steyn

This is an example of how stupid and arrogant some Americans are, (he is actually Canadian but wants to be American,) and I will take issue with this crap and my comments will be in red because that is what I see from the American side as expressed here ... U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode (Europe can sit back and watch the USA implode) February 27, 2005 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST (by EuroYank not a Sun-Times Columnist) A week ago, the conventional wisdom was that George W. Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was setting off to Europe to mend fences with America's ''allies.'' (by conventional European wisdom George W. Bush came to Europe to beg for financial aid because he had realized his earlier snobbery would bare no fruit.) I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share -- what's the standard formulation? -- ''common values.'' Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, ''freedom,'' that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run. (I think not Mark Steyn, diplomacy as stated by Immanuel Kant, is the art of war using other means. All week long President Bush met with not good buddy Jacque and not good buddy Gerhard and found out that yes the USA has shared many values with Europe, including about 120,000 Germans fleeing to its shores every year, (noting that a country like Germany is about the size of the State of Illinois but has 82 million population not the 12 million that Illinois has,) but they are not common values. The USA does not share with Europe universal health care. The USA does not share with Europe an American middle class up to its neck in debt, and only able to manage it by use of a second mortgage on the old homestead further increasing his debt and the possible loss of his home. The USA does not share with Europe 2-9 percent credit card rates or work contracts that are bought up if an employee is laid off, or generous pensions that are insured and do not disappear in the stock market manipulations. The USA does not share with Europe its two million incarcerated prisoners and the huge homicide rate that the USA has. The USA does not share with Europe a minimum 500 billion dollar yearly spending rate for its military, and I am just listing a few common values the USA has that Europe does not have or want. And why do Europeans and Asians have the money to invest in and finance the American National debt and Americans do not... huh... huh....huh? By the way no European government is allowed to raid its Social Security or Pension Trust Fund like the American governments always do.) And at the end what's changed? Will the United States sign on to Kyoto? (Europe has signed on to Kyoto. Yes) No. Will the United States join the International Criminal Court? (Europe is part of the International Criminal Court. Yes) No. Will the United States agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran? (The real question should be Will Iran accept any of the demands of the USA shoved down its throat.) Yes the answer is No No. Even more remarkably, aside from sticking to his guns in the wider world, the president also found time to cast his eye upon Europe's internal affairs. As he told his audience in Brussels, in the first speech of his tour, ''We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.'' (No European comment was made on the tens of thousands of American homicides each year, nor did any European out of courtesy question why Nazi parties in the USA are officially allowed and sanctioned there. etc) The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses' decolletage. They knew Bush wasn't talking about anti-Semitism in Nebraska, but about France, where for three years there's been a sustained campaign of synagogue burning and cemetery desecration, and Germany, where the Berlin police advise Jewish residents not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. (The American Texas cowboy and previous governer of Texas who by his own hand allowed American incarcerated inmates to be put to death by the hundreds, stared coldly at his European hosts who did not hold such views knowing that in the USA most Americans that are jailed are black or latino, forced to live in ghettos, and that the USA is teaming in inequality for minorities, women and others.) The ''violence in the Netherlands'' is a reference to Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist for making a film critical of the Muslim treatment of women. Van Gogh's professional colleagues reacted to this assault on freedom of speech by canceling his movie from the Rotterdam Film Festival and scheduling some Islamist propaganda instead. (Out of courtesy, the murder of a top American journalist critical of the CIA for years, the CIA that his father ran, was not mentioned, nor the 100 witnesses and informants to the JFK assassination that mysteriously died within a few years, nor the other thousands of people so called "squealers," who inform the public of police abuse, or government misuse of power, that yearly disappear, lose their jobs, get black listed etc. Nothing about them was said out of courtesy.) The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on a continent where the ruling elite feels it's in the people's best interest not to pay any attention to them. (The president, in other words, does not understand that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror had nothing to do with Iraq, and was an American affair that only increased the terrorist ability to recruit worldwide, and that Europe has absorbed millions of Muslim populations and given them legal refugee status from their homelands and given them all the benefits of their societies, something ignored by American regimes.) The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage. (and don't forget to mention that the American War for Independence was made possible by France, and that the Statue of Liberty was also made in France, and that a huge portion of the USA was sold to the USA "Louisiana Purchase etc.," by France, and that many of the designers of the American Constitution had studied in France, and that the American Revolutionary Army was organized and trained by a German general...) But, quibbles aside, President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc. (Yes the American Constitution has no such things in it because each State can decide what it wants for itself, unlike in the European Constitution where these things are put into Federal Law so that every citizen can enjoy their benefits.) Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution. (That is because in the USA each political party and its millions of lawyers need these inconsistencies to earn their living, and these things are decided behind closed doors and can be amended at will to the benefit of each political party at election time.) But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side. (Europe has no CIA, but considering the USA is only 5% of the World Population and contributes 25% Global polution to the World as its "Gift to the World," chances are that the USA could collapse sooner than 15 years being closer to the source of the contaminations, depending on which way the wind is blowing.) But either way the notion that it's a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up. (no comment... that remark was irrelevant.) For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature. (In 1945 the USA had a population of 125 million. Today the American population is about 300 million. In 1945 for example Germany had 65 million, today Germany has 82 million. The European middle-class is rich, but does not spend beyond its means, and the American dollar is almost like a Mexican peso and becoming increasingly more so.) (For your entertainment, please continue reading the rest of his statements, I am laughing too hard.) Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent. Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere. Stumble It!

the Stupid Chicago Sun Times Article by Mark Steyn

This is an example of how stupid and arrogant some Americans are, (he is actually Canadian but wants to be American,) and I will take issue with this crap and my comments will be in red because that is what I see from the American side as expressed here ... U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode (Europe can sit back and watch the USA implode) February 27, 2005 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST (by EuroYank not a Sun-Times Columnist) A week ago, the conventional wisdom was that George W. Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was setting off to Europe to mend fences with America's ''allies.'' (by conventional European wisdom George W. Bush came to Europe to beg for financial aid because he had realized his earlier snobbery would bare no fruit.) I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share -- what's the standard formulation? -- ''common values.'' Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, ''freedom,'' that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run. (I think not Mark Steyn, diplomacy as stated by Immanuel Kant, is the art of war using other means. All week long President Bush met with not good buddy Jacque and not good buddy Gerhard and found out that yes the USA has shared many values with Europe, including about 120,000 Germans fleeing to its shores every year, (noting that a country like Germany is about the size of the State of Illinois but has 82 million population not the 12 million that Illinois has,) but they are not common values. The USA does not share with Europe universal health care. The USA does not share with Europe an American middle class up to its neck in debt, and only able to manage it by use of a second mortgage on the old homestead further increasing his debt and the possible loss of his home. The USA does not share with Europe 2-9 percent credit card rates or work contracts that are bought up if an employee is laid off, or generous pensions that are insured and do not disappear in the stock market manipulations. The USA does not share with Europe its two million incarcerated prisoners and the huge homicide rate that the USA has. The USA does not share with Europe a minimum 500 billion dollar yearly spending rate for its military, and I am just listing a few common values the USA has that Europe does not have or want. And why do Europeans and Asians have the money to invest in and finance the American National debt and Americans do not... huh... huh....huh? By the way no European government is allowed to raid its Social Security or Pension Trust Fund like the American governments always do.) And at the end what's changed? Will the United States sign on to Kyoto? (Europe has signed on to Kyoto. Yes) No. Will the United States join the International Criminal Court? (Europe is part of the International Criminal Court. Yes) No. Will the United States agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran? (The real question should be Will Iran accept any of the demands of the USA shoved down its throat.) Yes the answer is No No. Even more remarkably, aside from sticking to his guns in the wider world, the president also found time to cast his eye upon Europe's internal affairs. As he told his audience in Brussels, in the first speech of his tour, ''We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.'' (No European comment was made on the tens of thousands of American homicides each year, nor did any European out of courtesy question why Nazi parties in the USA are officially allowed and sanctioned there. etc) The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses' decolletage. They knew Bush wasn't talking about anti-Semitism in Nebraska, but about France, where for three years there's been a sustained campaign of synagogue burning and cemetery desecration, and Germany, where the Berlin police advise Jewish residents not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. (The American Texas cowboy and previous governer of Texas who by his own hand allowed American incarcerated inmates to be put to death by the hundreds, stared coldly at his European hosts who did not hold such views knowing that in the USA most Americans that are jailed are black or latino, forced to live in ghettos, and that the USA is teaming in inequality for minorities, women and others.) The ''violence in the Netherlands'' is a reference to Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist for making a film critical of the Muslim treatment of women. Van Gogh's professional colleagues reacted to this assault on freedom of speech by canceling his movie from the Rotterdam Film Festival and scheduling some Islamist propaganda instead. (Out of courtesy, the murder of a top American journalist critical of the CIA for years, the CIA that his father ran, was not mentioned, nor the 100 witnesses and informants to the JFK assassination that mysteriously died within a few years, nor the other thousands of people so called "squealers," who inform the public of police abuse, or government misuse of power, that yearly disappear, lose their jobs, get black listed etc. Nothing about them was said out of courtesy.) The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on a continent where the ruling elite feels it's in the people's best interest not to pay any attention to them. (The president, in other words, does not understand that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror had nothing to do with Iraq, and was an American affair that only increased the terrorist ability to recruit worldwide, and that Europe has absorbed millions of Muslim populations and given them legal refugee status from their homelands and given them all the benefits of their societies, something ignored by American regimes.) The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage. (and don't forget to mention that the American War for Independence was made possible by France, and that the Statue of Liberty was also made in France, and that a huge portion of the USA was sold to the USA "Louisiana Purchase etc.," by France, and that many of the designers of the American Constitution had studied in France, and that the American Revolutionary Army was organized and trained by a German general...) But, quibbles aside, President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc. (Yes the American Constitution has no such things in it because each State can decide what it wants for itself, unlike in the European Constitution where these things are put into Federal Law so that every citizen can enjoy their benefits.) Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution. (That is because in the USA each political party and its millions of lawyers need these inconsistencies to earn their living, and these things are decided behind closed doors and can be amended at will to the benefit of each political party at election time.) But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side. (Europe has no CIA, but considering the USA is only 5% of the World Population and contributes 25% Global polution to the World as its "Gift to the World," chances are that the USA could collapse sooner than 15 years being closer to the source of the contaminations, depending on which way the wind is blowing.) But either way the notion that it's a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up. (no comment... that remark was irrelevant.) For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature. (In 1945 the USA had a population of 125 million. Today the American population is about 300 million. In 1945 for example Germany had 65 million, today Germany has 82 million. The European middle-class is rich, but does not spend beyond its means, and the American dollar is almost like a Mexican peso and becoming increasingly more so.) (For your entertainment, please continue reading the rest of his statements, I am laughing too hard.) Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent. Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.