When children are good, their parents permit them to breakfast upon cereals with over 50% sugar content. When they are bad, they get porridge. Well, you've all been very, very bad little readers, so today you get--you guessed it--a big old helping of Balt-O-Meal. That's right, old Balto finally finished his series on the United States, and you guys get to read the best parts! Here we go from last Friday:

Years ago I saw a sensational cartoon in the American press: a middle-class couple was eating dinner unworriedly in their house, while hidden under the table there was a Chinese with a knife between his teeth. the caption: "The Yellow Peril". And, without an atrocious fear, aggression has almost no motive. This explains, also, the philosophy of the neoconservatives we talked about yesterday. Which, nonetheless, is beginning to stop disrespecting Europe for its "cowardice" and "old-fashionedness", as has so often been said, and has begun fearing it: have not France and Germany demonstrated enormous moral and political strength by opposing the United States, which only had the support of modest, average countries like Spain? Not counting Great Britian as usual, of course. And the fact that the value of the euro has finally passed that of the dollar benefits American exports by lowering the price of its products, but it shows that when we go beyond missiles, the Old Continent stands firm on its rich complexity, as another influental American conservative magazine, the New Republic, laments, alarmed at the confluence of postnationalism that the EU is designing, becoming the standard of the anti-Americanism that is boiling in this world.

Oh, good Lord. A "Yellow Peril" cartoon? Maybe in the Hearst papers during Korea. Balt, please provide your source. Where did you see this? The meme that the Americans are pissing their pants in fear is repeated over and over in anti-American circles in Europe. Uh, Balt, don't underestimate the Yanks so easily. They've shown a great deal more courage in the last two hundred years than, say, the Mallorcans. Strength? France? In Le Monde Diplomatique's wet dreams. The one thing everyone outside France seems to agree on, no matter what other disputes they might have, is that the French government are a bunch of weasels. They've managed to deal themselves out of any major hand that's going to be played on the world scene in the next twenty years. And I'm not gonna be the guy who calls up Marty Peretz at the New Republic to tell him he's running a "conservative" magazine.