A nice matched set of articles arrived in my mailbox yesterday. In The Nation, Eric Alterman assesses anti-Americanism in Europe and discovers that Europeans don't resent us, they just resent Bush, while in The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash looks at anti-Europeanism in America and finds that it comes primarily from the Bush government and its supporters. Gosh, you don't think there might be a cause and effect here, do you?

Garton Ash's article is valuable because he reproduces examples of current right-wing pundit rhetoric in all its bratty infantilism ("Euroweenies"). This is good because he's writing for a readership that's unlikely to be familiar with the work of Jonah Goldberg, much less Scrappleface. Some of what Garton Ash quotes has escaped my attention -- I didn't realize Mark Steyn had made reference to "the Eurinal of history," and now that I know he has, I'd argue that it says a lot more about Mark Steyn's psychosexual development than it does about geopolitics.