[i]"Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor and foreign affairs columnist at the Guardian."[/i]

What do you think is going to come out of his mouth? Other than a desperate boistering of his world view, the kind of self pitying trash article about "venus envy".

[i]"Obama says, 'In America there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world.'[/i]

In case you aren't familiar with this old trick, it's called pandering to your audience. The problem with that is, that pandering to Europeans will not get you anything, since their role in the world is shrinking, and so founded in clueless mercantilism, that they've done more to make permanent the likes of Saddam Hussein, Qadafi, Ahmedinejad, and the budding censors and Gauleiter types in latin America than anything else.

No-one looking clear at it would envy it, other than those taking a non-linear view of the world - one in which they like to see leaders say things that conform to the listeners idea of what they wish the world was like, rather than what it really is like.

[i]Uncertain whether to laugh or cry, Europeans ask: Is this sort of thing to be taken seriously? What is going on? For let's be honest: Krauthammer is a bit of a clown. And he has a very European surname.[/i]

So if he has a 'European name' he should be expected to think in the manner a Guardian writer prescibes?

[i]"Expressing one's anti-European sentiment can be a way of building up and displaying one's American identity and patriotism," said Patrick Chamorel in a European University Institute study published in Italy in 2004.[/i]

No it isn't. It's contrarian and not as respectable as pretending that they actually don't spend more thime than they should making a bogeyman of the US, of Americans, and of any dicernable and unique postition the US government or American people take.
Moreover, we're talking about further European-to-European "see how big our Johnson is!" pandering from a place where one surely can understand America in depth: Italy.

"Mars and Venus" is hardly the right desription of the dynamic: it's more like a handful of rather direct Americans making occasional comments about a terminally passive-aggressive CLASS of Europeans. A class that has been employing hatred of America, founded entirely in envy, for decades to define their own civilization which is growing less distinct and more characterless by the year.

It's not just Americans who think European population dominated by godless wimps, it's the far more God-fearing and less prone to wimpish populations of most of Africa, the Near East, Asia, and South America who do. The Americans are the group of people who are at least divided on the issue.

So why fixate on Americans? Why not turn that venom on, say, the Arabs who actually detest you? Are you afraid that they won't indulge the whining, hang their heads in sympathetic shame for the sake of the European illusion of relevance? Or are you afraid that it somehow lead to cultural retaliation?

Look, more Europeans than you would ever imagine, for all of the talk of being a helpful friend with friendly advice, [i]yadda, yadda, yadda,[/i] DON'T take criticism well at all. Either on a personal or popular level. They just don't. They tend to react as though someone took the last shred of their pride, and then banged their drunken girlfriend.
No-one ever seems to ask the question of these Eurpean critics with any seriousness: what [i]they[/i] would do in the situatuions that they pedantically harangue Americans about, or, for that matter what [i]they're[/i] repared to [i]actually do[/i] in the cisrcumstances that the US is in - which they selectively call out America for abuse over. Nor should you, because the results will still involve a situation where others are expected to pay up or shed blood, and not them. NEVER them. The likes of Tisdall, not to mention much of European international opinion arrogantly imagine themselves the oracles, lesson-givers, and presumptive overlords of the human race.

Don't you think for a moment that people, especially those other than Americans, don't just exhibit "envy", but genuinely and deeply detest them for it?

Yes, yes. Of course, of course - it SIMPLY NEVER HAPPENS, and we all know that one phrase, "freedom fries", emerging from the midst of a state of years of unremitting recreational European harangueing from SIX YEARS AGO, because it merely exists, remains a permanent stain. But nothing else may, not to you.

What you're discounting here, outside of your selective experience, is that by comparison of magnatude, virtually no-one in America even CARES what Europeans opinion is from day to day, because it virtually never changes from decade to decade, and it's largely a collection of negative, self-serving, passive-aggressive hostility, and is largely useless.
Remove your own limited level of experience from it, and realize that there are more to this world than a handful of bloggers that you'd like to silence.

Look for a moment at Tisdall. He's basically from the provisional wing of the "dismantle western civilization" crowd, and his article contains NOT ONE fact of any consequence, only OTHERS OPIONION PIECES. Are you intelligent enough to understand what that can indicate?

Case in point: yesterday on BBC World Service on a "global" call in show (read: the archipelago of backwaters where the only ligit broadcasting they can get is BBC WS), an enraged man alledged (without correction in any way by the presenter/chariman/host,) that one in 4 Americans work for the security establishment, and that it was an outrage that the Federal Education budget was 1/12th of the defense budget.
Never mind the idiocy of ignoring that Counties and States fund education and not the Federal Government, but that the idea that 80 million people (half the total workforce) are employed in national security.

It's abject lunacy, hatred, and ignorance, and I've had to listen to people throw these things around on the basis of assumed fact for my entire life.

But then again, you're worrind about TWO WORDS from 2003, as is the likes of Simon Tisdall do as well.

Grow a damn spine, and find the REAL points of risk to your well-being instead of looking for voodoo dolls to stick pins in for your feeble emotional satisfaction.

If mainstream European opinion wants to maitain this kind of practice for another half century, as though it will magically demoralize what is, in effect, their physical protector, global diplomatic broker, and the only real market for they overpriced rubbish, then sobeit. Don't expect the society recieveing that persitent fountain of invective, and ignoring it at the request of your governments, to like it.

To begin with, I didn't copy text in my comment.

I also don't lecture you "because you are French". I disagree with you because you're a self-absorbed moron for who everything is about France. You'll note that the word "French" almost never appears on these pages until you try to make it, and anything, about France.

Do yourself a favor: stop trying to pretend to intone German words and miscellany from the memort bank of your fevered mind. It's more insulting than anything else, and you aren't very good at it. You might as well show up here and call the Germans here "Bosche" or "Capo".

I suppose by your statement that "I studied in Germany.." that likely means that you can imagine me fitting into your pitiful envy of Germans. I did. I also worked there, but to explain this to your limited intellect, I learned a few things there, but it didn't program me as you would like to imagine it a cult.

I also lived in the DDR. I learned that autocracy, the cult of the nation-state, leftism, and even the sick european conception of coservatism, in large part constructs evil and is founded on the lie of achieving free stuff from the state, in spite of bing in a state of class-warfare with authority of any percived type. It's promotion of the concentration of power in the state makes evil (of the fascist-marxist-leninist type invented in your benighted continent) more possible.

Listen, you lout: I NEVER ONCE used the phrase "we saved your a** twice..." Not in my entire lifetime. If you want to project hatred, do it with someone else.

And set aside the movie-Nazi German. What's your problem? Don't you think that Germans are human?

Again, I ask, how long ago did it start, and how many times did the US press amplify the "freedom fries" thing? Compare that to the frequesncy of contrived outrage and your strange hypersensitivity to it.