My favorite classicist/raisin farmer takes a hefty slap at France:
In short, our failure [in Iraq] is essential to confirming the entire European view of how the world should work. Expecting French support would be the equivalent of asking them to admit that investment in American-style air-conditioners was necessary not merely for their dead, but for the living as well — or that those lengthy August retreats to the beach and mountains while their parents and grandparents fried was an indictment of their entire socialist paradise. Who could think that the same type of individual responsibility for which they caricature us is sorely needed, in an amoral country where the younger and hale expect the state to do for the old and unwanted what they themselves will not? I have been to dozens of American hospitals in August in the scorching San Joaquin Valley heat, but never to one that was empty of nurses and doctors. And when it hits 110 in supposedly provincial Fresno, 10,000 Valley residents — poor or rich, young or old, citizen or alien — do not die.
Read the whole thing, and hope that his learned optimism is well-founded.
