A Euro Dissenter Speaks Out

IBD Editorials ^ | March 26, 2009

[Kaslin]

Leadership: The new EU president may have ruffled Old World feathers calling President Obama's massive spending "the road to hell," but Mirek Topolanek and his fellow Czechs know that road all too well.

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One European leader has the guts to say what the nonsocialists among his fellow leaders — like German Chancellor Angela Merkel — know as well as he does. The Czech Republic's Prime Minister Topolanek warned during a European parliamentary session that the United States is "repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on."

Topolanek added that "all these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell." The current U.S. economic policies will "undermine the stability of the global financial market," he added.

European politicians of the Social Democrat persuasion were beside themselves. Topolanek is accused of being "impolite" and "undiplomatic" to the U.S. president just before his first European visit (behavior that never seemed to concern Euro-socialists in the past). And besides, they say, Topolanek just lost his majority in his own country's parliament; his views have no real weight.

But a grain of truth has weight no matter what its source.

The sad thing is this: It was Margaret Thatcher who told Jimmy Carter to his face, alongside other NATO allies, that he was dithering in confronting the Soviet Union. And it was Charles de Gaulle who in 1961 warned John F. Kennedy that in Vietnam "I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire."

[Cacique]

btt

[neb52]

You should check this guy out. He is a sharp whip of the old mold. Daniel Hannan, British MEP

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/Daniel_Hannan