(By Ray D.)
"European Socialists eager to work with U.S. Democrats
OPORTO, Portugal (Reuters) - European Socialists promised on Thursday to work to rebuild Europe's strategic alliance with the United States now that the Democrats control Congress after last month's elections.
Socialist leaders attending a meeting of the European Socialist Party pledged that with the Democrats on the rise, strong ties could be renewed with the United States after years of cool relations with Republican President George W. Bush.
Howard Dean, chairman of the national comittee of the U.S. Democratic Party, is attending the two-day conference together with the leaders of leftist governments of several countries and party leaders from across Europe.
"We are not anti-American, we want the real America, your America," former Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the European Socialist Party, said in remarks directed at Dean." (emphasis ours)
Look carefully at his statement: Mr. Rasmussen is essentially saying that anyone who is not a Democrat or a follower of Howard Dean is not part of the "real America." So if you are not a Democrat, you are now a sub-American in the eyes of the president of the European Socialist Party.
His claim that Europe's Socialists are "not anti-American" is an obvious lie made even more obvious by the fact that he felt the need to make the claim in the first place. For years on end, Germany's Social-Democrats have both condoned and encouraged the most outrageous anti-American behavior (especially around election time) and looked the other way as Americans were collectively smeared as blood-sucking parasites by Germany's largest trade union just last year. There have been many other examples throughout Europe over the past several years. Mr. Rasmussen may think he can play Howard Dean and his far-left pals for chumps, but fortunately not everyone has such a short memory.
The sad reality is that the Hate America ideology that Mr. Rasmussen and his Socialist followers have helped spread is so deeply ingrained throughout Europe that neither the Democrats nor the Socialists nor anyone else will be able to do away with the disease anytime soon. The fact that the "good" Americans are in control of Congress and the Socialists are suddenly in the mood to "make nice" will do little to change that.
Once again: The rude awakening for America's Democrats will come when they realize that the "Hate America" cancer that has spread through Europe and beyond (while many of them looked the other way because after all it was hurting Bush) is a plague that they will have to contend with directly. The chickens will slowly come home to roost as Democrats assume power in Congress and potentially take the Presidency in 2008 (although that is still a long way off and far from certain.) Democrat leaders, and those seeking to work with them abroad, will soon realize that the anti-American prejudices they have allowed to fester, grow and boil over are far wider and deeper than they could have ever imagined. It is all far more complicated than Hate Bush. They themselves will undoubtedly suffer at the hands of a monster they allowed to grow and thrive (and, to a degree, helped create).
The bottom line is this: We all continue to have a common interest in ending prejudices against the United States. The plague of "Hate America" that has infected European media, politics and society is something that we should have been working against for years now, not something to be addressed only when a certain political constellation happens to shine upon us. (More here)
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