Biden in Brussels: Let the Man Finish His Belgian Waffle!
Vice President Joe Biden, speaking in Brussels, tried to be a gracious guest and ended up reminding us how some see America: it’s exceptional only in that it thinks it’s exceptionally exceptional. He said:
As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, D.C., as the “capital of the free world.” But it seems to me that this great city, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.
You’re surprised he didn’t refer to Brussels in the plural, but obviously someone vetted the remarks.
Capital of the free world? That’s quite an assertion, but Joe backs it up. A thousand years of history, for example. A fine criteria. Often one finds one’s self at the border of a foreign county, wondering: how free is this place, anyway? The border guard explains: Mongolia is 4,000 years old. Well then! Must be four times more free than Brussels by the Biden Metric. It serves as the capital of Belgium. That’s something Washington can’t claim. Oh, they’d like to; every few blocks there’s a Belgian restaurant — Le Sprouterie, Henk’s Euro-Mush Shoppe — and you’ll find drugstores with signs that say BELGIAN SPOKEN HERE or those happy, unmistakably Belgian flags fluttering outside, as if a bit of that glamorous Brussels elan would rub off. But no one’s fooled. The HQ of NATO.
How do you distract gullible rightwingers from the fact that BP just turned the Gulf of Mexico into a lube pit? Easy: get’em crazy about some blather from the VP. From BP to VP in one easy-sleazy move.
Lileks is a humorist. You might try some, sometime. I know that most lefties have great difficulty seeing any humor in their own foibles but not every joke can be about Sarah Palin.
… and of course Prez Obie was fiddling what tune while the gusher gushed? Oh wait, we can still hear the refrain. It’s Bush/Cheney!
I contend that Karl Rove personally dove down there and blew it up with a deep-sea suicide vest. Have you seen Karl Rove in the past few days? I haven’t either. I rest my case. It’s so good being leftist and not having to really think about anything.
Nice try at diversion there dimwit.
I’m quite aware that liberal brains aren’t flexible enough to deal with more than one topic at a time, but we conservatives have no such limitations.
You know, you’re absolutely right! We should have sent Biden to the Gulf of Mexico instead. I’m sure that he could have accomplished something there. After all, nobody messes with Joe!
ADD? Can’t focus on more than one issue at a time? Such a shame…
ehmm…actually EU regulations are the only single factor that forced the Italian government to liberalize some market areas, eliminate some corporative privileges, and reduce (or pretend to) public spending. Seen from Italy, Brussels is probably the strongest free-market and small-government driver. Please do inform yourself about what you are writing
Seen from Italy?
sorry, bad english. I meant: “from an Italian point of view…”
Which is why Italy is one of those countries threatening to implode, like Greece?
that’s a bit catastrophistic…
Joe Biden is an idiot and serves as the court jester for the Obama regime. As for shef rogers I think he should consider the fact that the one who is hiding from the BP disaster is the Obama who has shown absolutley no leasdership and who has taken much money from BP. It is amazing how the left wing ideologues refuse to find any fault in this fraud in DC. They are still blaming Bush and Cheyney except it is not working anymore. They got what they wanted a Left wing Marxist and America will soon have the economic status of a Cuba or North Korea and the environmental disaster of a East Germany.
Brilliant. Flex those mussels, Biden.
LOL The Mussels from Brussels: Joe Biden?
Joe Biden’s VP-ship was a Political Payback for Joes Son arranging for the “Disappearing” of another Obama cover-up. Joes son was to fill his vacated seat.
Joe is even more of an empty suit than Barry, The Perfect Washington Insider: see Scumbag Corrupt Drunken Career Politician eg. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charlie Rangel, John McCain…
What’s funny, is the belief that there is anything democratic or free about the European Union and the way it is organized politically.
Like the League of Nations and the United Nations before it, the Brussels talking shop has congealed into bureaucratic lard. Nations like individuals are motivated by self interest, an instinct these organizations pretend has been tamed by rules and regulations. The lazy Greeks sponged off the bustling Germans because they could. But now the Germans are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. The dominoes are going to tumble and the old national rivalries slowly resume. The Russians will go on being the Russians, we’ll decide we ought to tend to our own knitting again, and everybody over there will start being afraid once more. Elsewhere, Africa is returning to barbarism and the caudillos strut in Latin America. Human nature never changes, only the forms its evil takes.
Amen, brother~!
“Africa is returning to barbarism…”? When was Africa NOT barbaric? Despite all the pap we’ve been fed about the magnificence of Benin bronzes, or the rustic wonders of Kwanza, or how the people lived in harmony with the earth until the heinous white people arrived, the sad, tragic truth is that Africa has always been and remains the bunghole of planet earth.
Brussels may indeed be the Capital of the Free World, especially to far Left self-loathing Americans in the USA. Readers might be interested to learn that Brussels, the epicenter of the World Government scheme known as the EU, also sports a city council made up primarily of radical Leftist political groups. It also has a substantial number of members who are Muslims as well. The Muslims and the Leftists have made common cause with each other for years, and Muslims also are beginning to outnumber native Belgians in many neighborhoods of Brussels. About 1/3 of the city council members are Muslim, and we know what Free-World lovers the Muslims are! The largest single political block on the Brussels city council is Called “Parti Socialist”. Muhammad is the most common name awarded to male babies born within the city of Brussels, as it has become in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, etc. Europe is a cauldron for the multicultural One-World paradise that the Left wants to foist on the West. Brussels is the epicenter of the EU, Capital of the Free World, as defined by the Left, and the epicenter of the multicultural cancerous tumor which holds hands with the retrograde forces of Islam to overcome the evils of Western European Civilization and it’s vile Satan spawn of Capitalism.
Morton,
I’m passing around a hat to help pay for the plane tickets for all the Far Left Self-Loathing Americans to MOVE to the Capital of the “Free” World – Brussels. I’m sure they will fit in perfectly, sipping their Cafe Late Mochachino’s complaining about another World Catastrophe that The US of A didn’t prevent!
biden should return to brussels in a decade or so and observe just how free it will be at that point. By 2020 or 2025 the city and the country and perhaps much of europe will be islamized and all the vice president will see is anti-American and anti-semitic slogans. The european union will be mired in economic stagnation as sharia law becomes commonplace, women are systematically excluded from schools and the workforce, and innovative thought and efforts become illegal. Yes, indeed, biden has a lot to look forward to. Perhaps the chocolate will remain available.
Given that the current batch of reprobates, scoundrels, scalawags, deformed souls and similar ilk with their bloody paws on the levers of power at this time inside the Beltway, that they have been antagonizing countries which were treated well by the previous administration; I am sure they did not count on this idea being thought: Why not recognize those parts of the US which no longer recognize the suzerainty of Washington?
In other words, undo the mistake other countries made in not recognizing the Confederate States of America.
I am a Canadian and frankly as long as my country has a reputation lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon wheel rut, while countries like Iran and other “countries” which rank lower in freedom and transparency are treated as better
friends by the current batch in power inside the Beltway; I refuse to put up with this. No more oil to the US, or anything else that crosses the Canadian border to the US. Whatever is sold to the US can be sold elsewhere.
1. Shef Rogers in case you haven’t noticed, Chairmen Obama is on vacation putting out right now and we right wingers need something to distract us from what’s going on in the Gulf. Oh what the hell, that dumb cracker ass honky Biden will do just fine.
I am going to plagiarize myself.
” I understand that we are supposed to pay lip service to our European allies, but someone needs to explain to Biden that lip service involves pleasantries but no actual physical contact, despite the suggestive name.”
Finally.
An answer for the European problems and American debt.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014081.html
Will everyone please just lighten up on President Obama? He’s got way to much on his plate to worry about some silly little oil dump in the Gulf of Mexico which was caused by “Big Oil” anyway and is most likely the fault of the evil George Bush and the reprobate Cheney to begin with. President Obama had an interview with Marv Albert and is opening a dialogue with Charles Barkley both of which surely take precedent over the Gulf. Then it’s vacation time with Shelly after all the hard work of getting the whole world to love him. As for good old Joe “foot in mouth” Biden, since his head has become so swollen with his own munificence perhaps he should dive on down to the broken pipe, stick his head in the pipe and stop the flow of oil.
I think Lileks wrote the whole column so he could use “Freedom’s just another word for ‘city close to Bruges’.” Brilliant.
For a priceless satire on the EU, see “The Gravy Train,” which you can find on Netflix.
I’m with you, Joanne. It was a column that wrote itself backwards.
And brilliantly so.
Joe Biden and “Recovery Summer”
Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. may go down in history as the most quoted VP America has ever had.
Until now, Nixon’s disgraced Vice President Spiro Theodore Agnew may be said to have held that title thanks to his inimitable alliteration such as his classic putdowns. They included “nattering nabobs of negativism,” “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”
Biden could never hope to match those and doesn’t seem to be much into alliteratiion anyway and his most recent classics aren’t fit for family viewing. Those include his remark to Obama after the passage of Obamacare that “this is a f***ing big deal” and his comment to a custard store manager that he was being “a smarta**” for asking him to cut taxes.
His latest excursion into memorable quotations may not even be Biden’s originally but it’s being associated with him. At least his reference to “recovery summer” is not rated PG 13 like the others. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1763)