Thinking Meat

Mark Steyn:

Well, the Parisian journalist Frederic Royer has just launched a new weekly tabloid called L'Anti-Americain. The first issue includes a parodic diary by George W Bush with the entry: "Ask the CIA: Where's China?"

Hilarious! Bush is so dumb he can't even find the real 21st-century superpower on a map! As it happens, it was the Canadian prime minister, a renowned sophisticate and indeed a fluent franco-phone, who last year declared in public that China was the most important nation in the southern hemisphere.

I can't find the source for this quote, but I do recall this admonition by the Left's intellectual superstar, Bill Clinton:

An expanded NATO is good for America; and a Europe in which all democracies define their future not in terms of what they can do to each other but in terms of what they can do together for the good of all -- that kind of Europe is good for America.

Second, America must look to the East no less than to the West. Our security demands it. Americans fought three wars in Asia in this century. Our prosperity requires it. More than 2 million American jobs depend upon trade with Asia.

That's right: while well-traveled Rhodes Scholar Clinton is delivering the State of the Union in Washington, he places Europe to the west, and Asia to the east. I wonder if Bush Jr. would be able to get away with such a faux pas, not to mention the part in italics, which seems to imply that American prosperity requires fighting wars in Asia.

Steyn link by way of LGF.