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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Mark Steyn's Thanksgiving

This is a day the rest of the world should be thankful for the United States!

Excerpting from a Mark Steyn column is difficult. You really must read the whole thing.


American Treasure
Giving thanks.
By Mark Steyn
National Review
November 18, 2007

...Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.
...

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.[read the whole thing]
Mike's America Gives Thanks

I know it is fashionable even among conservatives to occasionally bash President Bush for compromising too much on some issues, not enough on others. But there is one issue on which he has remained absolutely rock solid, even in the face of the most vicious, partisan, hate-filled opposition and that is the National Security of the United States.

Whether it's the war in Iraq, or our efforts to protect Americans here in the United States from further attacks we know President Bush will never waver, falter or compromise on that core issue.

It's clear that President Bush cares deeply for the safety of the American people. No better illustration of that than the photo at right of him hugging Ashley Faulkner, whom he met quite unexpectedly while on a campaign swing through Ohio in 2004. Ashley's mother was killed in the September 11th attacks and she had become emotionally withdrawn until President Bush took her in his arms, covering her head and held her close as Ashley's father, Lynn, took the photo.

This man cares! And for that and more I give thanks for President Bush!

Here's the story if you haven't heard it:

On a more personal note:

I give thanks to each of you who read and comment here at Mike's America. You, my online conservative friends, are the bedrock of this nation. You honor the sacrifice and service that have made this the greatest nation on earth blessed by freedom, opportunity and prosperity. You are an inspiration to me.

I even give thanks to the moonbat patrol. Without them to remind us what darkness and idiocy awaits those who slip loose from the moorings of our great American traditions, we might fail to remain watchful as well as thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

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