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06/13/2005: "Keeping All Options on the Table"

Closing out our series on Europe as a paragon of Dittohead values, let’s look at what the Bush Administration can do to help Europe build on this legacy, becoming in the process a full-fledged example of what can happen when traditional extreme right wing values run supreme. God knows America needs an example! With liberals representing a full half of the population (fortunately the half with zero political power), Americans need to see the paradise on earth that beckons when individualism and unencumbered property rights hold sway. We’ve already seen the sterling example Europe provides with its pay toilets – let’s imagine that this important sub-continent dramatically replicates this and other exemplary values to create an entirely new birth of freedom. A small impediment to realizing this compelling vision is that Europeans seem oblivious to the opportunity, so we need to give them some incentive. I picture it as a kind of Marshall Plan, only this time instead of money for post-war rebuilding we’re exporting our right-wing values. As to the post-war part, hopefully it won’t come to that, but it has to be recognized that spreading American values via military invasion is a Bush Administration core competency (and can we really afford to take this option “off the table?”). In any case, let’s assume that somehow we’ve gotten Europe on board with needed reforms. Where to start? Well, first we need to do something about that nationalized health care. It’s just too embarrassing to have a system that costs so much less that America’s free enterprise based healthcare system. I propose Operation HMO To Go, with the military parachuting in an emergency cadre of claims adjusters. Or maybe those planes should be airdropping handguns – it’s a tough call on whether bringing Europe under the nestling arm of the Second Amendment is a higher priority than a properly-functioning health system. Here’s a win-win solution to this conundrum: the health claims adjusters can sit on the gun crates as they’re dropped out of the planes! The synergies are indeed beautiful – in one fell swoop we eliminate Europe’s unfair health care advantage (no expenditure of medical talent on plugging gunshot wounds) while showing the French what egalite’ really means! Here’s another set of synergistic initiatives: heavy duty tax cuts paired with massive increases in defense spending, to bring American-style fiscal sanity to Euro-ledgers. The following examples of European imbalance are left to the reader to devise the proper Dittohead approach to “bring balance to the farce” of Old Europe’s unamerican vestiges: six week vacations, weird political parties named for colors, and, in particular, foreign languages. (Hint: consider the phrase “recruiting targets.”)