Monday July 21, 2003

CLOGS, FROGS, SPROUTS, ETC. Victor Davis Hanson on nationalized name-calling:

Remember various Germans' eerie evocations of Bush/Hitler, "another Caesar," Jews in Miami and New York, clicking one's heels, the German way, and other foul nonsense. Certain French apparatchiks and their consorts weighed in with slurs against Turkey and Eastern Europe ("end of Europe," "foreign culture," the need to stay "in their places," etc.) or Israel ("sh**ty little country"). Canada's officials chimed in with "moron," and other assorted outbursts. In contrast, very few in the Bush administration engaged in such childish smears.

Well, of course they don't -- Bushites have people to do that for them. Like Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Forget the fact that the German contribution to the Renaissance was the realization that you could fit more beer in a bigger mug... a German Green is a Gestapo wannabe with a red paint-job... little German babies...

Peters ends this diatribe with a prose poem about how ugly and ill-mannered he found these two Germans he saw once.

I think we can agree that this sort of thing, while enjoyable in small doses, is unseemly in high places (and at the Post). And it says something awful about the current crop of democracies, including ours, that some people think they can drum up public support with that kind of behavior.