Last month at the European Parliament, British member Nigel Farage lectured the president of Poland on why he is mistaken to support the EU. Farage is then followed by some guy from Luxembourg named Robert GOEBBELS no less, who asks him (Farage) what suggestions he has. Goebbels' question is what the parliament calls the "Blue Card Question", whatever the hell that is. As usual, Farage is highly entertaining and takes no prisoners.
It is interesting how all the classic political lines are falling apart. Nigel Farage refers to massive protests against an enforced austerity budget in Greece as hundreds of thousands in Greece demanding their democracy back. I'm not sure he's entirely wrong about that. For years, a conservative government ran up huge deficits because they weren't aggressive about collecting taxes, then they lost an election to the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party just in time for the socialists to have all these protests because the country needs to be bailed out and the thrifty voters of Germany put all kinds of understandable restrictions on it, which are actually enforced by the liberals at the IMF... It's a mess all right, but nobody with ideological zeal can make sense of it.
ReplyDeleteI like Farage because he really doesn't represent a "British Tea Party" or the ghost of Margaret Thatcher any more than he represents classical social democracy. Whether he could run a government with a sensible program and make it work, is not so clear.
Speaking of Goebbels, there is an apartment complex in Madison Wisconsin called Quisling Terrace. It is owned by a nice quiet retired doctor, owns some real estate, probably votes Republican, whose family name happens to be Quisling. It was a common name in Norway before one son of one of them epitomized collaboration with Hitler. There are still plenty of people in America named Lynch. There may still be a Boycott or three in Ireland.