The Texan and His Rogues
I guess I'll be the hundredth blogger to mention the cover of the new Der Spiegel, but somehow I don't feel as badly as the Germans think I should. Here's an English-language summary of the lead article.

(How can I get a poster of this cover?)

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings has a great take on it, as well as some nigh-incomprehensible European respondents, the most incredible of which seems to think we're being arrogant by assuming that an article about America is about America. (I said it was incomprehensible.) Maybe we're supposed to pretend we don't notice when the Europeans talk about us behind our back in an internationally-circulated magazine. (It is in German, after all: Perhaps we ignorant rednecks weren't supposed to be able to read it.)

They don't understand us. We keep telling them who we are and what we're about, and still they willfully, deliberately don't understand us.

We've spent the last decade being told we don't pay enough attention to what's going on outside our borders. Now they have our attention, and they complain about that. I guess they expected us to settle for a few sternly-worded words of reprimand in the international press. As if 3,000 people in New York and Washington were pushed off the seesaw at recess.

They were killed.

It's not going to happen again.

Is it that hard to understand?