An Irrelevant Backwater

Mark Steyn's column today in The Chicago Sun-Times analyzes the Bush Tour in Europe as a visit to an old folks home (no disrespect to the elderly intended). He figures that "there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill."

Here is a jewel from it:

The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage.