Schroder’s humiliating electoral defeat follows the European Eight op-ed diplomatic coup last week. Suddenly the French, having recently sided with the Germans unequivocally, seem to be edging back toward support of the U.N. and the U.S. If Chirac tilts back toward the London-Washington axis, Schroder’s isolation will be complete. As will Germany’s. The big winner? Blair. By siding with Washington, Blair has actually placed Britain in a central role in the New Europe. I can’t see the downside myself. Good analysis here in the IHT.
LIND AND BUSH: Michael Lind is an old friend of mine, and friendship should always pre-empt politics. Much that Michael has written about American society – from class to race and the American South – is as provocative as it is well-researched. But his passion does tend to get in the way sometimes. Check out Gary Rosen’s smart review of Lind’s latest book, “Made In Texas,” where Lind tries to portray the president as a crazed remnant of a racist and fundamentalist backwater. Even Bush’s choise of a location for a ranch is suspicious:
In picking a retreat so close to Waco, Lind informs us, Bush chose to associate himself with a city that was once “one of the centers of lynching in the United States” and “one of the national bases of the Ku Klux Klan,” a place where the Menckenesque satirist W.C. Brann was shot in the back in 1898 for ridiculing “Baptist hypocrisy,” where “local ayatollahs” burned “diabolical LP’s and books” in the 1970’s, and where, in 1993,”David Koresh and his cult” suffered their “apocalyptic immolation.”
Or maybe he just liked the countryside. Rosen homes in on another odd paragraph, attempting to explain the president’s affinity with Israel:
Like present-day Israel, Texas before the civil-rights revolution was a Herrenvolk (master-race) democracy, combining populism within the majority ethnic nation with the state-enforced subordination of ethnic minorities. It is no coincidence that the products of two similar Herrenvolk societies, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, appear to be most themselves when waging war on behalf of their tribes or relaxing on their ranches.
Oy.
The Dish 