Now I don’t know what the hell is up with the Europeans, but I can’t help but compare them to International Ice Skating Judges. They try to give the appearance of straight-laced professionals interested in fair play and sportsmanship, but you know they’re just a bunch of hucksters on the take. And why are European bureaucrats the worst liars? I don’t know if any Europeans read this thing, but do they sound as fake to you as they do to me? It’s like they’re not even trying and that’s the most insulting part of it.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Well, this sounds pretty honest:
“This is not about Saddam Hussein, and this is not even about regime change in Iraq or even the million people killed by Saddam Hussein or missiles or chemical weapons,” Pierre Lellouche, a legislator who is close to Chirac, said in an interview. . . .
“It’s about whether the United States is allowed to run world affairs and battle terrorism and weapons proliferation essentially with a small group of trusted allies,” or whether many nations should have a say, he said.
France is also described as “a middle-size power whose military has been allowed to atrophy for lack of funding in the past decade.” That’s true, too — but it’s not the French talking.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I wonder if Sgt. Stryker is really Pascal Bruckner:
I see today in France a kind of destructive other-worldliness. Certain Europeans imagine they can escape History’s difficulties by making a show of their finer feelings, as if they can create a progressive ideology out of demonizing the United States. They compare Bush with Hitler while accommodating the Islamists. There hasn’t been much [European] intellectual progress since the fall of communism. Rather, things have gotten worse.
You never see them photographed together. . . .