Bush has turned left-liberal consensus-loving Third-Wayers into a state of stark, staring, bug-eyed apoplexy

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Good on you, Bush baby: you go ahead and tell 'em

By Boris Johnson

YOU know, whenever George Dubya Bush appears on television, with his buzzard squint and his Ronald Reagan side-nod, I find a cheer rising irresistibly in my throat.

Yo, Bush baby, I find myself saying, squashing my beer can like some crazed redneck; you tell 'em boy. Just you tell all those pointy-headed liberals where to get off. Even if you felt that he was jammy to attain the White House; even if you are troubled by his syntax and his habit of turning the lights out at 9pm, you will surely agree that there is something magnificent in the way he has taken on the great transatlantic Left-liberal consensus-loving Third Way-ers and turned them into a state of stark, staring, bug-eyed, heaving-bosomed apoplexy.

He's a monster, shrieks Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, adding that America has become a "rogue state" in the two months since Clinton left office. In the New York Times and the Washington Post, the old Lefties are beside themselves with rage and grief, accusing Bush of cynically pretending to be a compassionate conservative in order to win the White House - not that he won it, they snarl; stole it, more like.

He's a nutter, they say; he's a reformed alcoholic basketball freak who got the job only because of daddy, and he doesn't understand that, if he carries on like this, it's going to be early lights out for everyone. And the more they scream, of course, the more I find myself secretly admiring the guy's style.

He sticks it to North Korea, which is still, after all, a barbaric Stalinist regime. He refuses to apologise to the Chinese for the downing of the EP-3 spy plane; and why should he? It was their fat fault that one of their fighters bumped into the American plane, in international air space, and consequently crashed into the sea. He's going ahead with his promised tax cuts of $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years; and that seems wholly reasonable, given that he said he would do so before the election, and that the American economy is badly in need of a stimulus.

He's decided to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which also seems sensible, since that document is now about as meaningful as the Treaty of Versailles. You may doubt that it is possible to build an umbrella against nuclear attack, whether by Russia or anyone else. But I have never quite understood why, on those defeatist grounds, we should stop the Americans from even trying to defend themselves, not to mention the rest of humanity.

But of all the tough-guy acts that Bush has performed in his first few months, of all the pieces of exuberant Reaganism, nothing has so intoxicated the world with hate as his decision to scrumple up the Kyoto protocol and use it for putting practice in the Oval Office.

Malcolm Bruce, a Liberal Democrat MP, has already accused Mr Bush of being a mass murderer; not for his record in executing felons in Texas, but for consigning future generations to a dustbowl planet. Yesterday in the Commons, a Labour MP with a beard asked Tony Blair how America could be so incredibly selfish, given that the earth belonged not to Bush, but to every soul who walks it.

Polly Toynbee, my old friend, tells her readers that America is "morphing into an evil empire of its own". A special EU delegation went to Washington on Tuesday, consisting of Kjell Larsson, the Swedish environment minister, and Margot Wallstrom, the EU environment commissioner. It is not clear whether Bush had time to see these great ones personally, what with his heavily charged agenda of jogging, golf and watching movies, but, according to the Financial Times, they received "short shrift".

You can see where all this is leading. It will not be long before we are told that America is so selfish, so isolationist, so obsessed with its sovereign right to put its broad-bottomed people in gas-guzzling Chevy Suburbans, that she can no longer be trusted with global leadership.

We will be told - we are already being told - that Britain must make a choice, between America and Europe. We can either go for the rampant commercialism, the casino capitalism of George Bush's America, where petrol costs a dollar a barrel, and where Dubya has just scrapped some Democrat laws against arsenic in the water supply; or we can go for Europe, a softer, gentler, landscape of earnest Swedish commissioners and worker participation, and higher taxes, and tighter regulation.

If Bush is going to be so frighteningly tough on China and Korea, people will say in their fat-headed way, then perhaps we had better build up this Euro-army. And they will be guilty of a stupendous error.

Because we still need a rich, confident America; not just to provide the cash for the global military leadership that the United States has given from the Gulf to Kosovo, but also to keep the world economy moving. The hypocrisy of the Europeans over Kyoto is staggering. They attack America in hysterical terms, and yet the 15 EU countries have never come close to meeting their own eight per cent target for cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. They have not even agreed which countries should cut the most. If America were to meet its Kyoto targets now, it would require a cut of 30 per cent in emissions, and how, exactly, is that supposed to work in the current economic downturn?

There will come a time when the market, and, inevitably, US technology, will deliver a greener planet, when cars run on water, or photo-voltaic cells. But it is plain ridiculous to ask America to make such cuts in emissions now, as Clinton recognised when Congress voted against Kyoto by 95 to one.

It would exacerbate the recession, and when Bush says no, he is doing what is right not just for America but for the world. And by the way, we Europeans already allow 50 microlitres of arsenic per litre in our water.

Boris Johnson is editor of The Spectator

-- Woa! (Don't@hold.back!), April 05, 2001

Answers

Thought the senate vote was 95-0 against Kyoto. If wrong, who was the 1? Braver than the 4 abstentions at least.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), April 05, 2001.

Yes, and another thing, the IPCC which is the mouthpiece for the global warming hoaxers is also know to create pollution of their own.

They create atmospheric contrails, and then study them.

Now, if you wanted to convince people that global warming was 'true', wouldn't you like to make a few million contrails to up the ante a little? P.S. the recent 'suiciding' of a key CIA player is probably related to China, Los Alamos and 'Chemtrails', Just an educated guess, Ann

-- Ann (morecuriousinfo@whadayaknow.com), April 07, 2001.


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