Roger Cohen pens some idiocy regarding Ireland's voters:
Europeans have spent a lot of time in recent years asking Americans how they could be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in electing George W. Bush. But when it comes to sheer electoral crassness, it’s hard to beat what the Irish have just done.
I can’t think of a country that’s benefited from European Union membership more than Ireland. It has catapulted itself in a few decades from beer-soaked backwater to the Celtic Tiger whose growth rates, foreign investment and rags-to-riches story were the envy of every languishing small nation with a thirst for a makeover.
Ireland did not owe it to the European Union to approve a proto-empire that will suppress democracy and freedom in Europe. And it isn't just the BDS-tinged preamble to a story on the European Union that tips a reader off that this article's point is absurd.
Why is it dumb or crass for Ireland to have rejected the EU superstate? Why is success in the past and current EU an obligation to approve a future EU that is a political as well as economic and monetary union?
Heck, perhaps it is a sign of Irish gratitude for what the old EU did for them that they killed the future EU that will undo the good that the old but less ambitious EU did for Ireland.
And to add insult to injeury, the Irish did it with the vote of their people--an error the EU tried mightily to avoid in their hatred of democracy. They will not make the same mistake again.
Europe was within a few percentage points of Irish voters in seeing the lights go out all over Europe, as far as I'm concerned.
The EU bureaucrats will no doubt succeed in their goal in time, but you won't be able to blame the Irish for that. They tried to save Europe.
