I think you will find that Europe is most likely to spin on a dime. You are right, they are either liberal weenies or hard righters.

After the murder of Theo Van Gogh, there were plenty of cases of anti-muslim violence, and yet we heard nary a word about them . OTOH, in the US, some muslim gets cut off in traffic after 9/11 and it's regarded as a hate crime and splashed over the media with the world condemning the US for a lack of tolerance. Europe was far more swift and accepting in it's own retribution of muslims compared to the US.

The point being is that Europe has a short fuse. All it takes is a couple of incidents and tolerance goes out of the window.

While it may seem odd to ban clothing, the opposite of that is accepting the wearing of Burkhas, and as they say, give them an inch and they'll take a yard, a practice that the followers of Islam have utilized a great deal in order to bring their warped culture to acceptance in the US.

Personally, I'd ban the religion as you would a dangerous cult, but then I'm just one of those wacky Europeans.

Still though, bans on clothing?

Low slung bags where the guy's shorts have obvious skid marks on them are kinda disgusting.

I always tell those characters: "Hey kid, your mother let you out of the house looking like that? Damn."

I think the two "sides" of European reaction are really two sides of the same coin. The key is that for continental Europeans, heavyhanded statist solutions tend to be the *first* impulse for addressing perceived problems, not the last.

The two responses - either drafting a 500-page Tolerance Code, strictly enforced from Brussels, making Tolerance mandatory and the lack of same thoughtcrime, or making laws against the preferred clothing styles of the people you're not tolerant of anymore - are much the same, at their root - it's about control.

The illustrative example that always drives this home for me is that most countries in continental Europe regulate the naming of children! You can't necessarily give your kid any name you want, it has to be cleared with the government first. Apparently most countries use a pretty light hand with this and aren't really overbearing about it, but the fact in itself is repugnant to Americans, who may be against it, but will fight to the death for your right to name your kid Dweezil if you want to.

This stuff is just beginning. I predict a MUCh larger, much less controlled and much more violent mob/government backlash against Muslims in France within the next 5 years. Unseemly things will happen in Britain, as well, though the most the government itself will do will probably be lots of deportations and jailings.

Europe's M.O. has always been to ignore problems until they become hopeless and intractable, and only then "solve" them the way a kid losing at checkers fixes his dilemma - by picking up the board and throwing it across the room in a tantrum.

Immigration and Islam is just one example of this currently at work.

Another is the social welfare situation. I doubt they'll do anything meaningful to correct those problems until it leads to national bankruptcy and breakdowns of the basic social fabric.

"Please don't make us angry. You wouldn't like us when we're angry."

Europeans are f*cking crazy and need to be Tasered. That won't sane them up, but they'll be twitching for a while and won't do anything really bad.

Plus, they're kinda fun to watch when they're just lyin' there on the ground in their berets and twitchin' a lot....

Fascism is just below the surface in Europe, biding its time, waiting to resurface again. Clinton sent troops to Europe to defend muslims against genocide. A future US president may do the same thing again. They never learn. "Never again" doesn't mean the same thing to them that it means to us.

They coddle islamofascists and then act surprised when they get bit and go burn down a bunch of muslim schools, all the while smirking about how stupid and racist Americans are. A few hundred Americans die in an awful hurricane and they eat it up; never mind the 30000 or so Europeans who died because of a minor heatwave.

Sorry for the rant. I've just had it up to here with much of Europe.

If we're still looking for similies, European governments remind me of public-school administrators of the "zero-tolerance" variety: they've at long last acquired the vague idea that they're supposed to make a show of authority once in a while but they still haven't a clue as to WHY, so they end up cracking down at random, without logic or proportion-- one day letting gangs roam the halls shaking down the other kids for their lunch money, the next expelling the honor student with a squirt pistol in his backpack.

I,ll bet a dutchman could do a lot of conking by throwing their wooden shoes and AL QUEDA terrorists it would look like something out of the 3 stooges BONK BANK BANK KNUCKLEHEAD