The Rattle and Hum in Europe

Dick Morris does a great job of slicing and dicing the dynamics of the current geopolitical momentum viv-a-vis "Dubya the Great".

The Democrats are in disarray with their putative candidate, Hillary, moving to the center, while the party elects leftist Howard Dean as its chairman. More and more, the Democrats are not merely inconsistent, wrong and/or misguided — they are the worst of all possible things you can be in Washington: irrelevant.

...Tony Blair is winning his election in the U.K. — having trailed for most of last year — because of the increasing success in Iraq. What once doomed him to defeat — cooperation with Bush — now boosts him to re-election.

... Jacques Chirac faces the embarrassment of trying to rescind the 35-hour work week, the foremost achievement of his previous four years in office. It is not stimulating employment, as he had hoped, and its repeal is igniting an anti-Chirac sentiment all over France.

...German Chancellor Schroeder just got trounced in the local elections in Sedgwick-Holstein, and his failure to push through many of his labor-law reforms is looming larger in domestic German politics.

...Vladimir Putin was upended in Ukraine and has faced an increasingly restive and demonstrating Russian public.

...Europe feels itself beset by the worst form of anti-Muslim prejudice. Assailed by self-doubt over their failure to do anything positive about Iraq, they watch the growth of neo-Nazi forces attacking the massive migration of Muslims into the European Union.

When sides were being chosen, Tony Blair called it right and Chirac, Schroeder and Putin called it wrong. They played to short term interests instead of strategic influences. They shall now pay the price.

As I've said before "Ignore reality at your own risk."