Denis Boyles makes my day

He reports on the European Press for NRO with the grim wit required for the task. Go read the whole thing. Here are the first two paragraphs, to get you started:

My late grandfather, Claude, distinguished combat veteran of the first World War and a man who could not say the word "France" without first saying "disgusting" or "ridiculous" or "gol-darn" or worse, felt about the press — such as it was in Kansas way back when — the way he felt about France. Once, fed up with a local newspaper, he abridged a half-hour fulmination on the idiocies of the midwestern media by simply picking up the rag, walking over to a window, looking out at a torrential downpour and muttering, "According to the paper, it's partly cloudy."

This was in the '60s, when creating alternative realities was a chemical enterprise that would soon become a journalistic one. These days, disputing what any fool can plainly see is a sacred calling in the global press, but of course the Europeans do it with a special anti-American panache, fueled by the reelection of George W. Bush. The reality of another four years of Dubya has created in the media a demand for a parallel universe unlike any since a generation of shaggy noggins first nodded out to Surrealistic Pillow. Here are some headlines from a place called lost hope: