A funny, and a bit true, view of what Bush should be saying while over there:
OTB
How to Euro-Speak
A phrasebook for the presidential tourist.
Europeans hate the way Americans talk. They think we're loud and uncouth and they don't like our jokes, except for Michael Moore. Plus, they resent the fact that they’ve had to learn our language because if they didn’t we wouldn’t buy their stupid metric widgets or visit their overpriced ruins.
So when the president goes to Europe to give his speech to all the EU-niks in Brussels on Tuesday, it’s important that he speak clearly — or at least clearfully. Because there are a few things he needs to say, and they can all be summed up in seven handy, easy-to-utter phrases:
1. Get a job. With their endless vacations and pint-sized workweeks, Europe can’t produce enough of anything — including more Europeans — to save themselves from doom. So the French and Germans have only one realistic strategy when it comes to revitalizing their comatose economies: Wait for the U.S. economy to rise high enough to float their petits bateaux. Meanwhile, the EU’s own reports have long shown the complete failure of the Lisbon strategy that was supposed to have the EU on a competitive par with the U.S. by 2010. Now, as noted in the EU Observer, the EU is failing to compete in technology and research, lagging behind not only the U.S., but also countries such as India. “The EU is falling behind,” admitted EU commissioner Janez Potocnik. “And we are now under pressure not only compared to our traditional rivals like the U.S. or Japan, but also China, India or Brazil. We are facing a much tougher competition in talent and knowledge than we are used to.” Why? “We don’t want to achieve our economic growth by lowering the social or environmental standards.”
2. Clean up your mess. As reported here and elsewhere, French leadership of EU and U.N. missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, among other African countries, have led to massive moral and tactical failures as “peacekeepers” have turned into rapists, thugs, robbers, and killers. In France, according to Le Monde, some survivors of the Rwanda genocide, which would have been impossible without French complicity, are finally being given a chance to ask for a hearing in a French court of law. This will almost certainly be blocked by the government, which has been covering up this gruesome scandal by burying it in slow-mo “investigations” for a decade now.
3. Stop taking bribes. Humanitarian groups have been screaming about the crisis in Darfur for a long, long time. The U.S. calls what is happening there a “genocide” — but the EU won’t buy that because if it did, it’d be forced by law to intervene, something it not only doesn’t want to do, but, logistically, could barely do if it had to. The U.N. Security Council is paralyzed because France, Russia, and China have blocked sanctions against Sudan. They blocked the sanctions because they all have very large oil and other investments there. Of course, this was the same reason the French rendered Security Council resolutions meaningless before the Iraq invasion, so not surprisingly, as the BBC reports, France is doing the same thing once again. The EU has introduced even more delay in bringing peace to Darfur because of a new insistence that war crimes — assuming anything ever occurs to bring them to justice — be tried before the ICC, where the U.S. does not participate.
cont....
OTB
OTB
How to Euro-Speak
A phrasebook for the presidential tourist.
Europeans hate the way Americans talk. They think we're loud and uncouth and they don't like our jokes, except for Michael Moore. Plus, they resent the fact that they’ve had to learn our language because if they didn’t we wouldn’t buy their stupid metric widgets or visit their overpriced ruins.
So when the president goes to Europe to give his speech to all the EU-niks in Brussels on Tuesday, it’s important that he speak clearly — or at least clearfully. Because there are a few things he needs to say, and they can all be summed up in seven handy, easy-to-utter phrases:
1. Get a job. With their endless vacations and pint-sized workweeks, Europe can’t produce enough of anything — including more Europeans — to save themselves from doom. So the French and Germans have only one realistic strategy when it comes to revitalizing their comatose economies: Wait for the U.S. economy to rise high enough to float their petits bateaux. Meanwhile, the EU’s own reports have long shown the complete failure of the Lisbon strategy that was supposed to have the EU on a competitive par with the U.S. by 2010. Now, as noted in the EU Observer, the EU is failing to compete in technology and research, lagging behind not only the U.S., but also countries such as India. “The EU is falling behind,” admitted EU commissioner Janez Potocnik. “And we are now under pressure not only compared to our traditional rivals like the U.S. or Japan, but also China, India or Brazil. We are facing a much tougher competition in talent and knowledge than we are used to.” Why? “We don’t want to achieve our economic growth by lowering the social or environmental standards.”
2. Clean up your mess. As reported here and elsewhere, French leadership of EU and U.N. missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, among other African countries, have led to massive moral and tactical failures as “peacekeepers” have turned into rapists, thugs, robbers, and killers. In France, according to Le Monde, some survivors of the Rwanda genocide, which would have been impossible without French complicity, are finally being given a chance to ask for a hearing in a French court of law. This will almost certainly be blocked by the government, which has been covering up this gruesome scandal by burying it in slow-mo “investigations” for a decade now.
3. Stop taking bribes. Humanitarian groups have been screaming about the crisis in Darfur for a long, long time. The U.S. calls what is happening there a “genocide” — but the EU won’t buy that because if it did, it’d be forced by law to intervene, something it not only doesn’t want to do, but, logistically, could barely do if it had to. The U.N. Security Council is paralyzed because France, Russia, and China have blocked sanctions against Sudan. They blocked the sanctions because they all have very large oil and other investments there. Of course, this was the same reason the French rendered Security Council resolutions meaningless before the Iraq invasion, so not surprisingly, as the BBC reports, France is doing the same thing once again. The EU has introduced even more delay in bringing peace to Darfur because of a new insistence that war crimes — assuming anything ever occurs to bring them to justice — be tried before the ICC, where the U.S. does not participate.
cont....
OTB
