Denis Boyles cracks me up

In his Euro-Press Review today Boyles offers seven phrases to President Bush for use in his speech next week to EU types during his visit to Europe. They're all funny enough, but as he winds up he administers a ferocious caning to Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder:

7. Jacques, Gerhard, get a better campaign issue. Chirac and Schröder are running nations that, if they were American sitcoms, would be cancelled and sold to European TV networks where they’d run forever, dubbed and dumber. Both nations are in economic sloughs; the Germans in fact are approaching Weimar-levels of unemployment. If they ran on their records in their coming elections, they’d crash faster than this cheap laptop of mine. So for both of these guys, the only campaign issue available is anti-Americanism. In the case of Chirac, it’s just cynical opportunism, sort of what you’d expect from a guy wanted on fraud once he loses his office. In the case of Schröder and especially German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, it’s blind ideology. As John Vinocur reports in the IHT, the small, cubical Schröder is not hiding his ambition behind his arrogance:

[A] speech by Gerhard Schröder, billed as a German-take-on-the-world and read out by Defense Minister Peter Struck (Schröder called in sick), grated. The Bush folk, trying so hard to be Europe-amenable seven days before the president’s arrival, suddenly found themselves laboring not to look too wrong-footed, embarrassed or provoked by a message from the chancellor they did not fully expect…

His text restated his determination that Germany get a UN Security Council seat cum veto power. It fled any mention of his quest to have the European Union lift its embargo on arms sales to China, a proposal that has enraged Congress across the board. And it urged an end to Iran’s isolation and consideration for the mullahs’ “legitimate security concerns” — on a day when James Woolsey, a Clinton administration director of U.S. central intelligence, was asking a seminar panelist if he knew of a single shard of fact indicating that Iran was not about to produce atomic weapons. (No answer.)

This latest burst of anti-Americanism in France and Germany has been aimed not just at the policies of the American government and the war in Iraq but also the culture of the American people, the popularity of which is something Chirac described as an “ecological disaster” during a visit to southeast Asia, just before the tsunami.

This kind of knee-jerk hatred colors the judgments of both men and their fellow citizens. If Germany and France hadn’t already demonstrated their ability to market brutal hatred during World War II, this might not matter. But to fan the flames of grotesque intolerance during a war on terror just to keep two political hacks out of their own growing unemployment lines is a bit much. If that’s worth deep-sixing the Atlantic “alliance,” that’s jake. Or maybe we could give Germany our Security Council seat (and our share of the bills) on our way out of the U.N. Let Europe pay its own way for a decade or two. If Bush makes nothing else clear when he arrives in Brussels Monday night for a “working dinner” with Chirac it should be that ultimately European anti-Americanism isn’t our problem. It’s Europe’s problem, and Euro-leaders should take the lead in solving it.