JONAH GOLDBERG has some unkind words for the European Street:

Indeed, Europe’s problems with Israel and America can be boiled down to these two attributes: guilt and arrogance.

The Europeans, as we all know, are now the backseat drivers of history. They had their hands on the wheel for a very long time, and the world is better off for it — an assertion which is, sadly, politically incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, but no less obviously true for being so. Were it not for European civilization leading the way for much of the last thousand years, humanity would be in a ditch. To suggest otherwise is to dabble in fantasy.

But, around the middle of the last century, the Europeans got lost and America had to get into the driver’s seat. This was very embarrassing for the Euros because, after all, they’d driven us around for years, treating us like we were a little brother they’d gotten stuck chauffeuring to Little League games. (The fact that the driver traditionally gets to decide which radio stations everyone listens to and which drive-thrus to stop at particularly rankles with Europeans who hate American culture.)

Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.