House of Eratosthenes

Let us count the ways:

1) Obama’s tax code, support of big government programs and redistribution of income, and subservience to UN directives…

2) He offers Euros a sort of cheap assuagement of guilt—in classic liberal style…

3) Europe is weak militarily and won’t invest in its own defense. But with Obama, they believe the US will subject its enormous military strength to international organizations—usually run by utopian Europeans. So they will play a thinking-man’s Athens to our muscular Rome…

4) Style, style, style…Instead of a strutting, Bible-quoting Texan, replete with southern accent and ‘smoke-em’ out lingo, they get an athletic, young, JFK-ish metrosexual…

5) Obama reassures Europeans that they, not American right-wingers, “won” the classical debates of the 1990s over economics, foreign policy, and government. He is a world citizen, who buys into human-created massive global warming, wind and solar over nuclear and clean coal, high taxes, and cradle-to-grave entitlements, and resentments of the rich…

The final irony?

The hated George Bush is still around; Chirac, Schroeder, Villapin et al. are history. Iraq is secure. Iran is becoming isolated. North Korea supposedly is denuked. And America is reassuring a jittery Europe that we will stick by them in a world of bullying Russians and Chinese.

A Modest Prediction

In 5 years, Europeans will prefer George Bush to a “We are right behind you” Obama.

This is me again. I have been taking a particularly keen interest in the variety of ways in which teenagers are raised by their parents. I notice that in some households, if there are any chores to be done at all in the upkeep on those households, the teenagers are spared all of it. For them, life becomes a never-ending procession of leisure activities, get-togethers with their friends, while mommy and daddy do all the work. Other teenagers are expected to help out. If there is manual labor to be done, some of them are expected to do their share before they are allowed to eat.

I also see some teenagers hate their parents and don’t seem to be able to articulately state, exactly, why that is.

Overall, I notice the teenagers who are afforded these existences of all-play-and-no-work, seem to be the ones with all these resentments toward their parents, and can’t say why.

Europe has earned a reputation, over several generations, of not having to fight her own wars. That continent acts very much, to my perception, like these teenagers who are spared all of the work, and are allowed to cast it off onto someone else. They don’t like us for our “cowboy mentality” and our “go-it-alone attitude”; it would make much more sense to dislike us for the ultimate effects of those attitudes we are supposed to have, than to dislike us for the attitudes themselves. But every European or European sympathizer who sets out to explain the cause-and-effect chain reaction set off by our cowboy attitude, ends up delivering some rambling, sloppy thesis of nonsense.

Methinks VDH has put into words what the European intelligentsia cannot. They’re motivated by style, and they have pubescent, simmering resentments toward us because they know our country has been doing their work.

I could be wrong about that. I may read a little bit more about this than the average bear, but other folks have been to Europe, and my little Europe-virgin feet have never touched it’s soil. So I think it is important to remember what it is I do not know. BUT — I have seen a lot of years roll by, during which time I’ve seen a lot of Europeans condemn the U.S. for trying to get things done, and occasionally lavish upon us praise for being idle. There seems to be a certain consistency in their wishes for things to be left the same way throughout the world with our presence, as those things would exist in our complete absence.

I dunno. Perhaps it is possible some academic types over in Rome, Lisbon, London, Paris, et al, nurse a simmering desire that our country remains completely ineffectual on the world’s stage — and it would still somehow remain seemly to call them “friends.” But I don’t see how. I don’t think, with friends like those, we have too much of a need for enemies. And far from bragging rights, their adoration of Mr. Obama seems to me to leave him with something for which he needs to apologize. I certainly would think about it, if I were him.

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Why Do Europeans Love Obama?Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Why Do Europeans Love Obama?
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008