Duck Season

Let's fire up the "Andrew Stuttaford in the Corner" fueled links machine. What's going on over there:

First. Andrew links to this juicy Daily Telegraph quote "The European Union is failing to keep track of huge annual subsidies, and 91 per cent of its budget is riddled with errors or cannot be verified, a financial watchdog said yesterday. The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year..." Greed, excess and corporate corruption. How un-American of them. (McDonald's made them do it, duh. ed.)

The Guardian has several interesting stories. Their expanded letters page is wall to wall Bush, and it begins here. I'm only about a third of the way through them, but be sure to check out this particularly enlightened viewpoint from the second page:

I address you, George, in your capacity as the world's leading terrorist fundamentalist.

****

Truthfully, George, you are a disaster. You have managed, in a few short months and years, to identify the first part of the 21st century as the time when a voracious new American empire burst upon the world. In the world outside the US, nobody believes in your calls for democracy. You stole your own election. You try to strangle democracies, like Venezuela, which do not deliver pliant regimes.

****

We live in a world, George, where we have to live together, to find common solutions to the huge problems that afflict us. The horrific irony is that there are answers to poverty; to war, racism, disease and ignorance. You, in the name of your god and your country, are deliberately drowning out those answers in your patriotic and bellicose clamour, because as you know they imply a world without you or your kind.

Signed Imran Khan, Human rights lawyer. Triple Bonus Points if you can figure out how a "HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER" can logically reason that the liberation of the Iraqi people from the barbarous Saddam Hussein was a "disaster." And what the hell did George do to Venezuela? I can't believe George was behind the popular uprising which led to their general strike last summer.

Quadruple Bonus Points if you e-mail this blog with the answers to poverty, war, racism, disease and ignorance. I'd like to be educated.

Contrary to the idiot bile fest found on their Letters page, the Guardian reports that 62% of the British public believe that the USA is "generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world." Meanwhile 47% of those polled believe Operation Iraqi Freedom was a justifiable war, 41% still oppose the war.

Check out these numbers:

The detailed results of the poll show that more people - 43% - say they welcome George Bush's arrival in Britain than the 36% who say they would prefer he did not come.

Labour voters are more enthusiastic about the visit than Tory voters. But it is only Liberal Democrats who are marginally more unhappy about his arrival, with 43% against and 39% willing to welcome him. A majority of twenty-somethings welcome Mr Bush. Hostility is strongest amongst the over-65s. There is a clear gender gap in attitudes with a majority of men - 51% - welcoming the president's arrival, compared with only 35% of women.

Pro-Americanism, as might be expected, is strongest among Tory voters with 71% saying the US is a force for good. But it is nearly matched by the 66% of Labour voters who say the US is a force for good. Anti-Americanism is strongest among Liberal Democrat voters but is still only shared by 24% of them and the majority see the US as the "good guys".

So let's set the record straight. 71% of Tory voters, 66% of Labour voters as well as a majority of twenty-somethings LIKE the United States, versus only 24% of Liberal Democrats who consider themselves in some form or fashion "anti-american."

Check out the CNN graph on the right to see how insignificant these Liberal Democrats are in the British Parliament. The data is a little outdated (c. May 2001), but it's the first graph I found. The CNN link is for their "UK Votes 2001" page, the feature story highlighting the "latest blow" to the Conservative party in Britain. If the Tory's are considered a weak-and-getting-weaker party, why do we concern ourselves with the Liberal Democrats, a party that holds 40% less electoral power than the Tory's?

How do you spell overly-vocal minority in British? I'm guessing that I'm missing an "re" somewhere.

Or check out this photo I took just last May. It was a quaint protest of about a dozen people, none of them really paying attention, in a park near the Parliament building. I apologize for the quality, it was my first real excursion as a digital photographer, but the image is clear enough to prove my point.

Does the Lift go all the way to the top? Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, denounces George W. Bush as "greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen." Dubya as a far greater threat to the world than Hitler, A.I.D.S., the nuclear Cold War, the plague, poverty, global warming or the designated hitter? Right.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan reports that Germany has ended political asylum for people from Iraq. Why have the Germans done this? Because "at the time and in the near future political persecution in Iraq can be ruled out."

What a terrible thing we've done!

Andrew also links to this message from an Iraqi:

I was counting days and hours waiting to see an end to that regime, just like all those who suffered the cruelty of that brutal regime...
Through out these decades I lost trust in the world governments and international committees.
Terms like (human rights, democracy and liberty..etc.) became hollow and meaningless and those who keep repeating these words are liars..liars..liars.
I hated the U.N and the security council and Russia and France and Germany and the arab nations and the islamic conference.
I've hated George Gallawy and all those marched in the millionic demonstrations against the war. It is I who was oppressed and I don't want any one to talk on behalf of me,
I, who was eager to see rockets falling on Saddam's nest to set me free, and it is I who desired to die gentlemen, because it's more merciful than humiliation as it puts an end to my suffer, while humiliation lives with me reminding me every moment that I couldn't defend myself against those who ill-treated me.....
Believe me, we were living in the "kingdom of horror".
Please tell me how could the world that claims to be civilized let Saddam launch chemical weapons on his own un-armed people?
Shame..
Can anyone tell me why the world let Saddam remain and stood against America's will to topple him? ... You all owe the Iraqi people an apology.

Andrew adds: "And today, these "anti-war" protestors campaign not against Assad or Saddam or bin Laden, but against the man who liberated these beleaguered, terrorized people. The demonstrators sicken, appall and horrify me. Whatever your views on the war, the mass graves surely made frenzied opposition moot. These useful idiots have come undone."

Indeed. While there may be much to criticize about the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom (see the letter from Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, here), the protestors who represent the anti-war left greatly lack the desire or political skill to effect change in this administration's policies, mainly because they're unwilling to play ball. To actually provide encouragement or effect change in the rebuilding process... to help ensure that the Iraqi people will live in freedom and prosperity... would necessarily force the anti-war hystericals to concede that the war was justified in the first place.

If the French, Germans and Russians wanted to see Iraq become a better place couldn't they donate soldiers and money in spite of their objections to America? Wouldn't a truely noble and enlightened society overcome their disgust for the savage Americans in order to dedicate themselves to a greater cause? The answer is NON. It's not America that is preventing the internationalization of Iraq, it's the international community. They're too unprepared and underfunded, totally unwilling to help rebuild the blood soaked society of Iraq.

Heaven forbid these useless idiots throw down their anti-war gauntlet and try and help make the world a better place. What a funny little corner these protestors have painted themselves into.