French goat has mad cow

A French goat has tested positive for mad cow disease. We wish Mr. Chirac a full recovery.


Sacre bleu!

Worst headline of the day

The worst headline of the day must go to CNN.com for this nonsense: "Protesters mourn those killed in Iraq"

The protesters aren't mourning those dead. They are using them as political tools. These "protesters" are human garbage and should be ashamed of themselves (and would be if they were capable of feeling shame).

Recommended reading

This article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is quite telling. He tells of Europe's sadness over the re-election of George W. Bush, and the growing divide between the views of Europe and America.

He then goes on to tell of how the election will likely cement the European desire to build a Euro super-state to counter the influence and power of the United States.

One must wonder what the United States of Europe would stand for. The end of Christianity at all costs? Support of tyrants around the world and opposition to removal of these tyrants? A consensus to do nothing to tackle dangerous problems such as those in Iran and North Korea? Continued corruption at the UN? One must only look at the French President to see what they stand for. It is quite possible that, should Jacques Chirac lose power, he would end up behind bars. As it turns out, French politicians are above the law.

On the other hand, I am proud to have Bush as my President. As the French President is quite possibly a future convict, our President exudes conviction. He has his flaws, but he also has a rare courage among politicians.

The Europeans despise our removal of Saddam. But I ask: would I rather belong to the kind of nation that saw a tragedy replaying itself day after day in Iraq and created a bigger mess by refusing to stand by and do nothing, or a nation that sees this tragedy playing out time and again and turns its back? Which is more likely to eventually have a happy ending?

Back to the article, Thomas Friedman goes on to mention that the people of Iran, in their desire for freedom, are Bush supporters.

I suspect there is more to the European disdain of the liberation of Iraq. My suspicion is that at some level the Europeans simply feel bad about themselves because they knew it was wrong to ignore Saddam's atrocities year after year, and yet lacked the courage to do anything about it. This explains why so many would want the liberation to fail. They would feel that their cowardice was justified.

Washington state election update

John Fund has a good piece in the Opinion Journal detailing the irregularities (to put it mildly) in the Washington governor's race. Again, one must wonder why the funky stuff seems to happen in Democrat counties. Liberal judges may help Gregoire walk away with a victory.

Going Canadian, part deux

It seems that when it comes to tsunami relief, "go Canadian" means not going at all (from the Calgary Sun):

The real reason we haven't sent our DARTs [rapid response team]is because we can't. It's the same reason we didn't send fighting troops to Afghanistan until the country had fallen, and that we aren't sending troops to Iraq, either: We just plain can't. We don't have enough of them. Those we do have are ill-equipped. And those who are equipped, we can't get over to there.

All this works to the Liberals' benefit when, politically, they wouldn't want to go to war anyway. And dismissing and disparaging the U.S.-led war on terror earns a lot of brownie points at home.

But helping out the Third World after a disaster -- well, that was supposed to be up our alley, wasn't it? It's the perfect liberal cause -- no real Canadian national interest at stake, no fighting involved, just an opportunity for moral self-righteousness and lots of self-congratulatory press releases. Perfect for the kind of country that dispatched its army to shovel snow in Toronto a few years back.

Except that we're not there.

And we're not even here -- for all the Third Worldism of Paul Martin and his cabinet, they dawdled. Martin didn't leave his vacation in Arabia. Bill Graham, the most anti-American, pro-soft power minister in the cabinet, explain-ed the Liberal hesitation by saying the cabinet was "absorbing" the magnitude of the crisis.

They were stunned, like scared schoolchildren. In the meantime, the big, bad U.S. was on the ground immediately -- as they always are with aid to disaster-stricken countries.

While the UN has planning and co-ordinating meetings -- and criticizing the U.S. for being "stingy" -- the U.S. is actually going about helping people, even regimes outrageously hostile to the U.S.'s own interests, such as Indonesia.

One photograph from Sri Lanka showed a frantic local wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt. Many of these people hate America -- but America helps them anyway.

We'll help these people. They'll still hate us. They'll have another disaster somewhere down the road. We'll help them again. That's what it means to "go American."