My favorite right-wing columnist, Christopher Caldwell of the New York Press, wrote this in the May 7-13 issue. Caldwell's day job is as a writer/editor at the Weekly Standard, a right-wing rag owned by Rupert Murdoch and edited by WIlliam Kristol, Irving's son. "This is the point, although Americans are reluctant to recognize it, of setting up the European Community: its member countries want to band together so they don't get divided and conquiered by the monster economy of the free world [the U.S.]. Europe, of course, is also a convenient way of getting these countries off the hook and allowing them to move democracy one step further away from the people, in hopes of getting a government more like ours, in which the people don't have to be consulted with much frequency. Take the French elections, which President Jacques Chirac called in order ot ratify France's position in Europe.... [N]o non-retired voter is so stupid as to vote to reform the welfare state, that is, to volunteer to do without benefits that everyone older than him has got and that he's already paid for. So what Chirac hopes to do is use the European monetary union to *force* his country into automatic deficit reductions by saying 'I didn't want to do it, but there was nothing I could do; we had to hit our targets.'" Doug
