Sophisticated, Educated, Enlightened Europeans Who Are Clearly Superior to the Drooling Rubes Who Make Up the Conservative Right Are Shocked to Learn that the Obamessiah Has Been Spying On Them

They're shocked, shocked to find espionage going on in an espionage organization.

I hope we ourselves don't hyperventilate over this. Of course we spy on our allies. Our allies are the easiest targets to spy on, as they give us a lot of access and won't hang our spies when they're caught. And we've been doing it forever, and they've been doing it for us.

There's always some shocked and stunned reactions from people when, say, it's discovered that Israel has recruited a spy in the US. Well, yeah. And we have our own spies in Israel.

These things are always embarrassing because people don't tend to know a lot of things they either should know or should have guessed. So governments have to overreact on their behalf, and pretend that they too are shocked to learn that the US intelligence agencies have among them some intelligence agents.

But that doesn't mean we can't laugh at the naivete and backwards, rustic provincialism of our Obama-loving European cousins.

You know, a month ago I was reading Le Figaro, a center-right newspaper generally thought to represent the more conservative (in French terms, which means "socialist lite") brand of upper middle class thinking. They were discussing the initial disclosures about the AP and James Rosen affairs and also the IRS scandal.

They claimed that obviously Obama doesn't have anything to do with these things because Obama is more of a "visionary" thinker who eschews the muck and mire of actual politics. They added that he was a "policy wonk" (or words to that effect) who enjoys tinkering with the tiny details of policy.

This is absurdly wrong, obviously. Obama only thinks about politics and campaigning, and has never dug into the details of a single bit of legislation. He subcontracted the center pieces of his agenda to the half-wits of the Democratic Caucus of Congress: Reid and Pelosi wrote the stimulus bill, Reid and his goons wrote ObamaCare.

And yet the accepted, uncontroversial French view is that Obama doesn't enjoy politics or partisanship and is up all night looking at subclause 114(c)3(iv) of his various boondoggles and attempting to more cleverly craft them. Because Obama wears the signifiers of the high-minded intellectual, they assume, stupidly, he must have the interests and abilities of a high-minded intellectual as well.

In a way, this is understandable: No one who doesn't live in a country can really understand the politics of it. That's why foreigners always sound so stupid when they weigh in on US politics (and why US citizens would sound dumb if they were to weigh in on internal European politics).

And yet there's this ridiculous belief of the European Typist Class that they've got a pretty good beat on what's going on in the US. Obama seems sort of European, therefore, he must be awesome, as to a European, all that is European is ipso facto awesome.

And now they're shocked that Johnny Dronestrike stoops to reading the emails of their diplomats.

Quelle surprise.

posted by Ace at 01:04 PM

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