From LGF:
Is the Associated Press now in the business of cleaning up the more outrageous statements made by CAIR officials like Ibrahim Hooper? It does look that way: AP alters CAIR quote in story about Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
AP: Cleaning up the human toilets.
From the Chronicle (as always, emphases mine):
Western Europe’s America Problem
By ANDREI S. MARKOVITSWhen my father and I arrived in the United States as immigrants from Romania — by way of Vienna — in the summer of 1960, we spent a number of weeks living with American families in the greater New York area. Some were Jews, like us; most were not. But all spoke some German because our English was virtually nonexistent at the time. What impressed me no end, and will always remain with me, was how all those people adored my Viennese-accented German, how they reveled in it, found it elegant, charming, and above all oh-so-cultured. For business and family reasons, my father had to return to Vienna, where I attended the Theresianische Akademie, one of Austria’s leading gymnasia. The welcome accorded to me in that environment was much colder and more distant than it had been in the United States, not by dint of my being a Tschusch and a Zuagraster, an interloper from the disdained eastern areas of Europe, but by virtue of having become a quasi American.
From the get-go until my graduation, many years later, I was always admonished by my English teachers, in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English, not to speak this abomination of an “American dialect” or “American slang,” and never to use “American spelling,” with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans. Of course any of my transgressions, be it chatting in class or playing soccer in the hallways, was met with an admonition of, “Markovits, we are not in the Wild West, we are not in Texas. Behave yourself.” Viennese-accented German, wonderful; American-accented English, awful. The pattern still pertains nearly 50 years later.
[ . . . ]
But as of October 2001, weeks after 9/11 and just before the U.S. war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a massive Europewide resentment of America commenced that reached well beyond American policies, American politics, and the American government, proliferating in virtually all segments of Western European publics. From grandmothers who vote for the archconservative Bavarian Christian Social Union to 30-year-old socialist Pasok activists in Greece, from Finnish Social Democrats to French Gaullists, from globalization opponents to business managers — all are joining in the ever louder chorus of anti-Americanism.
“We are all America!” was horse manure when the Euroweenies were saying it.
Ambivalence, antipathy, and resentment toward and about the United States have made up an important component of European culture since the American Revolution, thus way before America became the world’s “Mr. Big” — the proverbial 800-pound gorilla — and a credible rival to Europe’s main powers, particularly Britain and France. In recent years, following the end of the cold war, and particularly after 9/11, ambivalence in some quarters has given way to unambiguous hostility. Animosity toward the United States has migrated from the periphery and become a respectable part of the European mainstream.
Negative sentiments and views have been driven not only — or even primarily — by what the United States does, but rather by an animus against what Europeans have believed that America is.
[ . . . ]
The Swiss legal theorist Gret Haller has written extensively to a very receptive and wide audience about America’s being fundamentally — and irreconcilably — different from (and, of course, inferior to) Europe from the very founding of the American republic. To Haller, the manner in which the relationships among state, society, law, and religion were constructed and construed in America are so markedly contrary to its European counterpart that any bridge or reconciliation between those two profoundly different views of life is neither possible nor desirable. Hence Europe should draw a clear line that separates it decisively from America. In a discussion with panelists and audience members at a conference on European anti-Americanism at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, on April 29, 2005, at which I shared the podium with Haller, she explicitly and repeatedly emphasized that Britain had always belonged to Europe, and that the clear demarcation was never to run along the channel separating Britain from the European continent, but across the ever-widening Atlantic that rightly divided a Britain-encompassing Europe from an America that from the start featured many more differences from than similarities to Europe. The past few years have merely served to render those differences clearer and to highlight their irreconcilable nature.
That widely voiced indictment accuses America of being retrograde on three levels: moral (America’s being the purveyor of the death penalty and of religious fundamentalism, as opposed to Europe’s having abolished the death penalty and adhering to an enlightened secularism); social (America’s being the bastion of unbridled “predatory capitalism,” to use the words of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and of punishment, as opposed to Europe as the home of the considerate welfare state and of rehabilitation); and cultural (America the commodified, Europe the refined; America the prudish and prurient, Europe the savvy and wise).
Indeed, in an interesting debate in Germany about so-called defective democracies, the United States seems to lead the way. Without a substantial “social” component, a democracy’s defects are so severe that one might as well consider labeling such a system nondemocratic, or at best defectively democratic. To be sure, no serious observer of the United States would dispute the considerable defectiveness of its political system. But what matters in this context is not so much the often appropriate indictment of American democracy, but the total silence about the defects of German and (Western) European democracy. As Klaus Faber, one of this argument’s major progressive critics, has correctly countered, surely most segregated and alienated immigrants in the suburbs of Paris or the dreary streets of Berlin would be less likely than America’s critics to extol German and French democracies as free of any defects. Indeed, if one extends the “social” dimension to include the successful integration of immigrants, surely America’s democracy would emerge as much less defective than the alleged models of Western Europe.
Many of the components of European anti-Americanism have been alive and well in Europe’s intellectual discourse since the late 18th century. The tropes about Americans’ alleged venality, mediocrity, uncouthness, lack of culture, and above all inauthenticity have been integral and ubiquitous to European elite opinion for well over 200 years.
[ . . . ]
America is resented for everything and its opposite: It is at once too prurient and too puritanical; too elitist, yet also too egalitarian; too chaotic, but also too rigid; too secular and too religious; too radical and too conservative. Again, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The Europeans have never moves past feudalism. There was no democratization in Europe, only a change of masters. Europeans still have elites that tell them what laws they may and may not pass, what foods they should and should not eat, what art they should and should not like, what fashions they should and should not wear — and of course this is what Europeans and Europhiles mean by “culture”: Feudalism.
No thanks. Your “culture” isn’t.
Also from Don, this bit of earth-shattering news:
The Arizona Republic reported employers are cutting back on hours as that state raises its minimum wage.
Who’d'a thunk? Why, somebody ought to pass a law!
Er wait, they did. That’s why the jobs are being cut.
I just put up a link to Rudy’s campaign site and a blogroll (no more blogrolling here; it often slows loading way too much), and I see this on Don Surber — who is himself a stand-up guy:
What a wonderful headline in the Seattle Times: “Giuliani goes to the mat for Bushâ€
The NYC Mayor Emeritus is in California stumping for votes and what does he do? Does he pretend he didn’t really support the War in Iraq like that woman, that Hillary Rodham Clinton?
No. He stands behind George Walker Bush.
Well said, sir. Read the whole thing.
From the “you’ve got to be kidding” department. First, there’s this:
Gerbe . . . said this week that the country’s first hosiery line for men would go on sale in March “due to increasing demand from male clients.”
The pantyhose comes with a larger belt than for women as well as an opening, with “Men opaque”, “sheer” or “satin” available in four models of tights, with and without feet, and three models of feel-good knee-high hosiery made to help drain toxins and massage tired limbs.
Guess where there’s an “increasing demand from male clients” for pantyhose. Go ahead. Guess. Here then, I’ll give you a couple of hints.
No, it’s not the UK.
No, it’s not Belgium (but it could be).
No, it’s not even New Squealand (but good guess).
Figured it out yet? Why yes, it’s France!
And then there’s this — also from France, natch — and the headline is just too good to pass up: Court upholds urinal attack conviction.
PARIS (Reuters) - A self-proclaimed performance artist who attacked a urinal symbolic of the anarchic Dada movement with a hammer had his three-month suspended sentence upheld by a French court Friday.
And you’re going to love this:
“It was a nod to Dadaism, I wanted to pay homage to the spirit of Dada,” said Pinoncelli, 78, who complained about the “non-recognition of his artistic act.”
His “artistic act.” Beating on a urinal with a hammer.
Look, I know all about Dada. It’s one of those things you can do once — and of course, to take Dada seriously is to miss the whole point. But this moron things beating on a urinal with a hammer is an “artistic act.”
And you wonder why I hate artists?
They had the right idea in the 18th century. Artists got paid very little and did what the nobility told them to do or starved. Artists are by definition idiots, and like children, should be seen and not heard (and often, not seen, either).
Today's Lectionary
