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:: MAX BLACK ::

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

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:: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 ::

"the old bone heap"

They never faced up to post-World War II communism or to their responsibility for the cruelty and destitution that replaced their colonial empires in what came to be called the Third World. Even in the NATO alliance, they almost never met their military budgets.

Now they are sitting back and lecturing us while our coalition attempts to lift barbarism from the Iraqis, to sober up the nihilists of the Middle East and to defeat terrorism. The French and the Germans have revealed no plan, no will and no intention of bringing justice or peace to Iraq. The only evidence I have seen of their involvement in the area is long inventories of arms they sold to Saddam Hussein and catalogues of payoffs they received from the United Nations' oil-for-food scheme.

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throughout the Cold War and now into the war on terror, we Americans have episodically had to witness their imbecilic anti-American rallies. As they burn our flags and ignorantly depict our presidents as cowboys, we are supposed to take instruction from their infantile tantrums.

Old Europe obviously is conflicted about cowboys. Their chattering classes are given to using the term "cowboy" as one of disparagement. Yet American Westerns remain a staple of entertainment on television stations all over the old bone heap - Orwell's term - that is Europe.

France and Germany are sleeping, politically and economically, in the socialist bed of their own making--and they might never wake up.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the Baltimore Sun [>]

:: Max 7:52 AM [+] ::
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