Read Their Eyes
I'm watching Bush's Europe trip, and I realize Mark Steyn's right. This isn't a new beginning. It's a farewell tour.
You won't see visits like this as often in the future. American presidents might make them once per term, that's it. Except for fly-ins to Davos or such places for special events.
The connection is broken. There's time for a little wistful nostalgia. Everyone's saying the nice words, but it's like the "I'm OK, you're OK talk" you have with someone after you've already broken up with them and you've divided up the books and the CDs and the car engine is running and you're saying good-bye for the last time.
Nothing's really changed since 2003. Europe still hates what we're doing in Iraq, and they are going to make sure the U.N. does nothing in Darfur just to prove they can. They're going to do nothing, just to prove, through some perverse logic, the importance of the U.N.
Europe knows it's on borrowed time. Swamped with immigrants, with an abyssmal birthrate and a declining workforce that can't sustain its expensive entitlement network, it will be gone in a century. It's a lame-duck continent working on legacy. And look what it has chosen.
Europe has aligned itself with the nations everyone knows are the future rivals on the United States -- China and Iran. Aligned itself with them to the point of arming them with sophisticated weapons systems that will be used to kill us.
Europe isn't trying to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. Europe wants a nuclear-armed Iran. Europe is playing the pitiful role of a distraction, to keep the U.S. from doing anything substantive for as long as it takes the Mullahs to build their big bombs.
Europe wants China to threaten Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore. I can think of no good reason for that, other than to eventually get a lot of young Americans killed. [And a lot of Asians, but, of course, it's only the dead Americans that Europe likes to see on its TV screens. Schadenfreude.]
No amount of kissy-kissy feel-good talk can mask that.
Europe has chosen sides. It chose the other side. This isn't about Bush. I'm glad my son got to see a little of the old place before it becomes too uncomfortably hostile for an American to set foot there.
80 percent of Germans think it's a mistake to try to spread democracy and freedom in the world. Bush is wrong. We no longer believe in the same things. Bush probably knows that by now.
You won't see visits like this as often in the future. American presidents might make them once per term, that's it. Except for fly-ins to Davos or such places for special events.
The connection is broken. There's time for a little wistful nostalgia. Everyone's saying the nice words, but it's like the "I'm OK, you're OK talk" you have with someone after you've already broken up with them and you've divided up the books and the CDs and the car engine is running and you're saying good-bye for the last time.
Nothing's really changed since 2003. Europe still hates what we're doing in Iraq, and they are going to make sure the U.N. does nothing in Darfur just to prove they can. They're going to do nothing, just to prove, through some perverse logic, the importance of the U.N.
Europe knows it's on borrowed time. Swamped with immigrants, with an abyssmal birthrate and a declining workforce that can't sustain its expensive entitlement network, it will be gone in a century. It's a lame-duck continent working on legacy. And look what it has chosen.
Europe has aligned itself with the nations everyone knows are the future rivals on the United States -- China and Iran. Aligned itself with them to the point of arming them with sophisticated weapons systems that will be used to kill us.
Europe isn't trying to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. Europe wants a nuclear-armed Iran. Europe is playing the pitiful role of a distraction, to keep the U.S. from doing anything substantive for as long as it takes the Mullahs to build their big bombs.
Europe wants China to threaten Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore. I can think of no good reason for that, other than to eventually get a lot of young Americans killed. [And a lot of Asians, but, of course, it's only the dead Americans that Europe likes to see on its TV screens. Schadenfreude.]
No amount of kissy-kissy feel-good talk can mask that.
Europe has chosen sides. It chose the other side. This isn't about Bush. I'm glad my son got to see a little of the old place before it becomes too uncomfortably hostile for an American to set foot there.
80 percent of Germans think it's a mistake to try to spread democracy and freedom in the world. Bush is wrong. We no longer believe in the same things. Bush probably knows that by now.
