A Tale of Two Continents

Time Magazine cover this week


Daily Mirror (U.K.) cover today

(via LGF, twice)

More:

Theodore Dalrymple (a pen name for Dr Anthony Daniels) writes in City Journal:

The choice before the American public, according to the commentary in [French] newspapers, was between reason and religion, tolerance and bigotry, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, openness and close-mindedness, modernity and reaction. There are no prizes for guessing which of the candidates represented the former, and which the latter. For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own. . .

This analysis suggests America is becoming a proto-fascist state, where an aggressively predatory Hobbesian capitalism, unhindered by the law or even by any rules at all, stalks the land, turning everyone against everyone else, crushing all freedom, and making all normal social interaction impossible. For French intellectuals, President Bush incarnates this state of affairs.

There is no recognition here that the unemployment rate in France’s over-administered social-democratic welfare state is more than twice that of the United States, that the crime rate in France is far higher than that of the United States, or that the alienation from society found in France’s ghettoes is at least as great as that found in America’s, and furthermore that the alienated in France are far more heavily armed and dangerous to society as a whole. Self-examination has never been the strong point of French intellectual life.