Even here, such a policy suggestion is highly controversial and, in view of the high-profile names attached to it, it immediately provoked comment within the Dutch press – from within the NRC itself, of course, but also in the form of a press-agency treatment available in other newspapers, among which Trouw (Bolkestein wants to legalize all drugs).

Why are we reading about this now? Well, I’ll likely get criticism for sounding like a broken record, but once more: it’s because of the national election we’ll have here in the Netherlands on June 9. Such a significant political event naturally concentrates minds on coming up with solutions to the nation’s problems, which currently include an alleged imperative to find around €30 billion of savings from the national budget. And what do you know: in that NRC opinion piece the co-signatories assert that legalizing drugs completely will lead to cost savings of €31.5 billion. The law-enforcement outlays involved alone (about one-half of that savings amount, they claim) cost each Dutch citizen €924 per year. And naturally, once all drugs can be made and sold, they can all be taxed as well.

Of course, the Netherlands is famous/notorious for its already-existing “soft drugs” policy that makes it easy for people 18 years and up to go to a “coffee shop” and smoke cannabis. It’s this rather unique policy, practiced over some thirty years, that the co-signatories point to for their evidence that drugs legalization won’t just make everyone go crazy – Dutch cannabis use is in fact lower than in most other countries, including the immediate European neighbors where people either have to procure it through illegal means or come pay a visit to our fair land. Still, even that “soft drugs” policy needs reform in the eyes of these politicians, because it effectively sets up such impossible conditions for the coffee shops to be able to get their supplies that virtually every one of them is technically in violation of the law and so is subject to the authorities’ whim as to whether it can even stay in business.

I myself live here, right at “ground zero” for any such proposed drugs legalization. Sorry to say, a military background makes your EuroSavant quite disinclined to take any personal advantage of even the current “soft drugs” policy, much less any full legalization. How would I like to live in a guinea-pig land, so to speak, where such full legalization has taken effect? The politicians’ editorial does address the potential “demand-side” effects, not only pointing comfortingly to that 30 years’ experience with “soft drugs” but also asserting that mind-altering drugs will at least be safer and better-labeled when legal (and that the outright prohibition on any sales to minors would be retained). But I just don’t know.

                          

This is disappointing for all true EU-believers, since “Freedom of Movement,” including that for the purpose of going to another member-state to work, is supposed to be one fundamental principle of the EU, fully accessible to all new citizens upon their country’s joining. Still, things used to be worse. Almost all the 15 member-states already in the Union at the time of the 10-nation expansion of 1 May 2004 imposed restrictions on the ability of the new EU citizens (except those from Malta and Cyprus) to come take jobs in their countries; Sweden, the UK, and Ireland were the only exceptions who truly lived up to their EU principles fully.

And then, even for those countries that had to bow to pressure from nationalist economic interests and impose those worker restrictions, all of that was suppose to come to an end after five years at the latest, i.e. by May of 2009. Most in fact ended them after only a couple of years – in more than one case, likely after the country finally realized how stupid they were – but Austria and Germany carried on. Now these two want to keep carrying on, invoking the escape clause that allows the restrictions to be continued up until April, 2011 if doing away with them could be shown to threaten the respective national labor markets. Yes, both the Austrian and German labor markets are currently not looking so good, but that has much more to do with general economic conditions rather than the prospect of cheaper labor being allowed in from the East. This was nonetheless quite enough to manufacture the required fig-leaf of justification for prolonging the restrictions.

But you just have to wonder at the sight of the two “western” EU states with really the most extensive contact and history of engaging with the Eastern half of the continent still clutching at this labor market protection – wouldn’t they have learned by now to deal in an economic way with their immediate neighbors to the East?The Austrian authorities, in particular, should hide their faces in shame: Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and all the rest have been migrating there (in particular to Vienna, of course) for centuries, so that some of the most prominent personalities of the Austrian political, musical, and literary scenes, past and present, have sported unmistakably non-German family names.

Oh, and the NRC article finished up with a mention that the new anti-Muslim, “populist” Dutch political party of Geert Wilders, the PVV, has stated its aim of reimposing restrictions on the immigration to the Netherlands of Polish workers. These people don’t seem to realize that that would not be possible under the EU, that the time for such restrictions on these fellow EU-citizens – in the Netherlands’ case, at least – has long been over.

* The NRC article does not list those eight states, but it’s easy to figure them out, since that 10-nation EU expansion included but two countries which were not “Eastern European” – Cyprus and Malta – so the rest were Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. We should add the 1 January 2007 accession states – Bulgaria and Rumania – to this list of countries whose citizens are restricted in their right to work in Austria and Germany, although in those cases the timetable for when those restrictions may be imposed is of course somewhat different, namely through 2014.

                          

Now according to a further NRC article, it looks like NATO has actually taken notice of Clinton’s remarks and realized that it needs to come up with something to fix this situation. But that NRC report still does not paint what you could call a very reassuring picture. In fact, you could break down its news a follows:

• The Good: It’s no less than the NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is reported by the NRC to be determined not only to give NATO’s anti-piracy involvement off the Somali coast a “more long-term character,” but also to make it “more robust,” meaning at the very least the scrapping of this “throw them back” practice. Through his NATO spokesman, De Hoop Scheffer admitted that, up to now, it had been assumed that participating NATO member-states could get by simply with their own national law and the international law of the high seas in their dealings with such pirates. But now that is clearly by the wayside, and efforts are starting to draw up common NATO rules of engagement.
  
• The Bad: But there is another problem coming up which might even slightly delay that writing of the new rules of engagement: most of the NATO ships now on anti-piracy watch off of Somalia are shortly due to leave for other missions, mostly official visits to various ports in Asia! So NATO representatives are now meeting to address that problem first and find some replacement ships (or cancel those port-calls) to ensure a continue naval presence there even as pirate attacks show no sign of abating even after the recent successful, and deadly, US hostage-saving action.
  
• The Indifferent: Even as those NATO officials meet in Brussels, another conference is now going on there, under the sponsorship of the United Nations. Yes, its purpose is to gather together monetary contributions, mainly towards the cause of getting Somalia back on its feet towards becoming a functioning government again which can finally take action against its own pirate-citizens. The sum of $31 million is supposed to go towards building up the Somali police, and a further $134 as a contribution to the work of the peace-keeping mission, sponsored by the African Union, that is currently in that country.

Long-time €S readers will recall that we’ve covered this whole pirates issue here a number of times before. Viewed from that background, to me the truly mysterious aspect of how NATO currently seems to be fumbling the ball in its approach to the Somali pirates is how inconsistent policy is even among the different NATO member states. Yes, we have fresh examples of the Dutch and the Canadians just throwing back the pirates they caught, but we have also noted here before how the Germans at least are willing to deliver the pirates they catch to the authorities at “a Kenyan port,” which probably should be interpreted as Mombasa. And the New York Times has a useful article up about how – somewhat surprisingly – those Kenyan authorities in Mombasa might very well be both willing and able to prosecute – well, as “able” as the government in a relatively poor African country can be. And there is also European Union money apparently already allocated for the Kenyans to bring their maritime judicial facilities a bit closer to the modern age. In any event, Mombasa is clearly a better option than “throwing them back”; why can’t the Dutch and Canadians avail themselves of it?

                          

As we approach that latter celebration, a tiny but interesting detail has emerged concerning the exact sequence of events behind that “Fall of the Wall” on the evening (Central European Time) of 9 November, 1989. What that was basically all about was a massive swarm of citizens of East Berlin flooding to the Wall crossing-points – and then, indeed, over the border into West Berlin as they desired – motivated by the widespread belief that, in a drastic break from previous policy, the East German authorities would henceforth actually allow them to cross rather than shooting or at least arresting them, as would have previously been the case ever since the Wall’s erection starting on 13 August 1961. That understanding stemmed from a statement at a news conference just earlier that evening by Günter Schabowski, a member of the East German Politburo, to the effect that the full Politburo had decided to introduce a new travel policy allowing free movement by East German citizens to the West – whose coming-into-effect was said to be “immediate.”

As had already been realized by attendees at that event, Schabowski almost did not get the chance to announce this revolutionary change-of-policy, as that news conference had originally been convened to discuss the results coming out of the full East German Politburo’s meeting of earlier that week more generally, and it was only the last journalist’s question that unlocked from him that vital new piece of information. From that it had been assumed previously that Schabowski made some mistake, that the supposed new travel policy was really not something that the Politburo had approved but rather some sort of momentous slip of the tongue on Schabowski’s part – which, once it had led to masses of East Germans rushing to overwhelm the Berlin Wall crossing-points, could not really be corrected any more short of perpetrating some bloody massacres. After all, if the Politburo really did want to change the travel policy this way, one would assume that that news would have led off that news conference, front-and-center, rather than seeming like some sort of afterthought at the end and being dependent on some journalist’s last-minute question to bring it to the fore.

That journalist in question happened to be Riccardo Ehrman, someone with long experience reporting from East Germany for the Italian press-agency ANSA. Now Ehrman has let German television and the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel know that it was hardly any sort of coincidence that he posed the vital question that he did on that November evening twenty years ago. (Der Tagesspiegel’s article: The decisive question for the Wall’s fall: Not as spontaneous as so far thought.) Rather, Ehrman now maintains that, about an hour prior to going into that news conference, he had been called by “a high SED [East German Communist Party] functionary, a member of the Central Committee” with a request to be sure to ask Schabowski about the new travel policy – which of course he then did. And although Ehrman refuses even at this point to name a specific name, Matthias Schlegel, the author of the Tagesspiegel article, figures that this must have been Günter Pötschke, at the time head of the East German press-agency ADN, who certainly was a member of the Politburo.

Na Und?

So what is the point? From Schlegel’s article you get the impression that, in the first place, even after its meeting the East German Politburo had remained divided as to whether to introduce this new travel policy. Make no mistake: there was a clear faction, probably even a majority, that was in favor of doing so because they believed that such a measure to open up the state borders would relieve the growing political pressure on the East German regime. But it’s possible that Schabowski was one Politburo member not in favor of this measure, yet who was given the assignment of announcing it at the news conference on November 9. He almost got away with putting that announcement off and putting it off again – until that direct question from Ehrman meant he could no longer avoid discussing it.

For what it’s worth, coverage of this question by reporter Joost van der Vaart of the Netherlands’ NRC Handelsblad poses yet another angle to this “planted question” story. According to Van der Vaart, the travel-policy change which the East German Politburo had approved earlier that week introduced a certain freedom for East German citizens to travel over that state’s Western borders – but only having first received “permission” from the authorities, which would have been a fatal proviso in the minds of all East Germans who knew all too well what needing “permission” usually meant: certain denial. Yet when Riccardo Ehrman then asked his planted question about that policy at the news conference, Schabowski neglected to mention anything about “permission” prior to rounding off the press-event with his remark that the new policy was effective “immediately.” In this account, then, the main significance of Ehrman’s planted question was that it made Schabowski confront the issue but also provided him the opportunity to make his mistake of neglecting to mention anything about having to gain “permission.”

On the other hand, in the Tagesspiegel article the need for “permission” did constitute part of Schabowski’s explanation of what the new travel policy was all about, although his implication was that such permission would always swiftly be forthcoming. This would have been good enough to the ears of the East Berlin citizens, then, to send them rushing to the Wall crossing-points en masse without really feeling a need to worry about any such process for permission-application at all.

Clearly, then, there remains further room for clarification about just what did transpire in that series of developments behind the opening of the Berlin Wall. The new revelation by Riccardo Ehrman merely reminds us that those events were far murkier and more convoluted than many had previously assumed.

                          

As befitting its status as one of Denmark’s best-regarded daily newspapers, Berlingske Tidende has some good coverage of this affair (NATO’s declaration-of-confidence in Denmark), written by Ole Bang Nielsen. First off, Nielsen makes it clear just what this appointment means to the Danes themselves, namely a recognition that Denmark is no longer just a “footnote-nation and hesitant member of NATO,” as well as a personal vote of support to Rasmussen himself. To get there past the Turkish opposition, though, truly took a tremendous diplomatic full-court press – “the large European NATO lands finally threw in all their political ballast against Turkey,” as Nielsen writes. Breaking up that NATO meeting without having Rasmussen in place as the Secretary-General would have been a humiliation – especially for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who basically had announced the day before that Rasmussen would be named – so those European countries did indeed throw in everything, including Turkey’s prospective EU membership. Yes, EU matters generally do not belong being linked to NATO issues (the memberships of the two organizations don’t match very exactly, anyway), but Nielsen writes that certain threats were made nonetheless against Turkey’s EU membership process should it continue to hold out against the Dane. It seems even that the EU enlargement commissioner (Olli Rehn, a Finn) was on-hand personally to utter authoritative remarks toward the Turks such as “This does not look good from a European perspective, if Turkey does not give way.” There you have it: ordinarily Rehn did not even belong there at the NATO meeting at all, since he is an EU official, and because Finland is not a member of NATO anyway.

Does the Emperor Have No Muslim Clothes?

So the issue was finally resolved, and Rasmussen is the man. (Der Spiegel’s Matthias Gebauer even credits Barack Obama with resolving the impasse – that piece is in Der Spiegel’s on-line English edition.) But there still may be an “Emperor-has-no-clothes” element here: when everyone agrees that one of the new Secretary-General’s main tasks will be building better relations for NATO with the Muslim world, how indeed could the Danish prime minister, who handled that “Danish cartoons crisis” in an unyielding manner that resulted in anti-Denmark riots across the Muslim world, be a good choice to undertake that? Make no mistake: I applauded at the time Rasmussen’s principled refusal not to be intimidated into yielding on the fundamental principle of freedom of expression, and I still do (and indeed, had I been keeping up EuroSavant at that particular time, you would have been able to read about this opinion even as I kept you up-to-date on Danish and other foreign coverage). But one can still wonder whether, in light of this, he’s the right man for this particular job.

(There was another minor but interesting aspect of Rasmussen’s statement as he accepted the position. Let me give you here Berlingske Tidende’s quote of what he said: “I consider NATO’s tasks as some of the most important in modern times. As NATO’s coming Secretary-General, Fogh Rasmussen will build up trans-Atlantic relations and improve cooperation between the EU and NATO when it comes to international tasks like Afghanistan.” That’s right; I was back-tracking to check to see where the quotation-marks began and where they ended, but if this quote is accurate then it seems that Rasmussen likes to refer to himself in the third person!)

Interestingly, there are further interesting perspectives on Rasmussen’s naming to the Secretary-General post to be found in the Dutch quality-newspaper, NRC Handelsblad (Naming of Rasmussen a “blessing for Denmark”). This is mainly because NRC journalist Joop Meijnen has managed to swing some telephone interviews with two Danish political experts, namely Prof. Peter Viggo Jakobsen from the University of Copenhagen and Hans Mouritzen, director of the Danish Institute for International Studies. Both these gentlemen have great sympathy, in fact, for the Turkish resistance to Rasmussen’s appointment because of what in their eyes was his faulty handling of the cartoons affair. Mouritzen:

He gravely underestimated the sensitivity in the Islamic lands, operated in a much-too-passive manner, and refused to receive ambassadors from those lands. That is a disturbing handicap when you become chief of an organization which finds its crucial task in an Islamic land, Afghanistan. We don’t know how that will turn out.

In fact, Mouritzen goes on to say that Rasmussen would not have gained the post if there had been any other serious candidates on offer at the just-concluded NATO summit. But there simply were not. As for Jakobsen, he maintains that Rasmussen had been trying to line up some international job for himself for some time, to finally get out of Danish politics, but that his first choice was that of the one-man European Council president in office for two-and-a-half years established by the Lisbon Treaty (as opposed to the six-month national rotating EU presidencies we have now). Of course, the Lisbon Treaty is not yet ratified, and in fact there are growing doubts that it ever will be, so Rasmussen settled instead for another, more securely-established role on the international stage.

Turkish Hit Men

Finally we have the murky subject to take up of just what was promised to the Turkish prime minister and/or Turkish president (both of whom were present there at the NATO summit) to make them finally cease their resistance to Rasmussen’s appointment. One thing we know for sure was that a Turkish official would be named as Vice-General-Secretary. But there was other talk – coming mainly from the Turkish press – that Rasmussen had pledged to apologize for the Danish cartoons affair and to shut down the offending Roj TV. But, as we can all see in this English-language article from the website of another great Danish daily, Politiken, it looks like that is not going to happen. In fact, from the Danish opinion newspaper Information we already have word from an article entitled “Fogh in a difficult religious balancing-act” that, even as he flew from the NATO summit straight to Istanbul – what an amazing coincidence! – to attend a UN conference there on “Alliance Between Civilizations”, Rasmussen still publicly insisted on such principles as “freedom of expression as decisive for [the] open dialogue” that is needed between different religions and cultures – all of this couched, though, in the appropriate toned-down, moderate language that you’d expect Rasmussen to have to adopt whenever he happens to find himself in Istanbul – if he ever desires to get out of there alive, that is.

Speaking of his being able to keep body and soul together . . . maybe the photo that Information has at the top of that article gives us a clue why Rasmussen now wants to take pains to be conciliatory: as he smiles towards the turbaned fellow opposite him on the conference stage, he’s standing there with his right arm in a sling, having dislocated it (according to the caption) by falling down the stairs of his Istanbul hotel! What an amazing coincidence! Please, not that old “fell down the stairs” excuse which has served from time immemorial to cover up violence, whether domestic or otherwise, which people would prefer to keep hidden! I mean, in Scandinavia the public officials are famous for thinking nothing of just going walking in the city streets with their fellow citizens, so you’d have to assume that Rasmussen’s Danish security detail cannot be too intimidating; it looks like the Turks were ultimately at least able to send in their hit men to work out some of their frustrations over his appointment.

(Whoops: one final comment, back to Denmark, which now that Anders Fogh Rasmussen has gone off to NATO has a new prime minister. Yes, it seems Danish politics is a strange thing. You can be a free-market conservative, you can be a Marxist, or you can even come upon the scene at the head of the free-love-and-free-beer party, but to make it to prime minister there is but one requirement: you need to have three names, the last of which is “Rasmussen.” Let me introduce you here to one Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who was Danish prime minister until Anders Fogh succeeded him in 2001 . . .)

                          

From the very beginning of the European Union (i.e. from 1958; it was then known as the European Economic Community) the member-states have taken turns, at six-month intervals, at assuming the “EU presidency,” although the role is more-accurately described as the presidency/chairmanship of the Council of the European Union, which is the legislative forum for the member-states and usually the most-powerful of the EU’s component institutions. Naturally, the queue of countries waiting to serve their turn as president includes all EU member-states, and it was in the first half of this year that the first country from the great 10-country EU enlargement of May, 2004, had its turn as president, namely Slovenia.

The thing is, the second half of 2008 has proved to be far-from-normal times. First there was the diplomatic crisis over the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and now we have the international system of finance seriously in need of some restructuring. France is now EU President, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has by all accounts done a credible job in responding to the worldwide financial panic. (His intervention in the Russian-Georgian conflict to secure the cease-fire was subject to rather more mixed reviews.) The comfort the EU has had with Sarkozy as point-man on that crisis may have much to do with the French president’s own personal qualities, but it also stems from France’s status as one of the EU’s major powers and its deep and capable governmental machinery. What if one or more of these grave problems had arisen during the Slovenian presidency: could President Danilo Turk and the Slovenian government have effectively handled the task of leading the EU response?

Of even more urgency is the question is “Will Václav Klaus (president), Mirek Topolánek (premier) and the rest of the Czech government be able to handle taking over the EU presidency as scheduled on January 1, 2009?” It will be the first time that country has ever had that responsibility, of course. In addition to sheer inexperience, the Czech Republic is a relatively small member-state anyway (10 million population); more serious is the fact that it does not use the euro (and probably won’t qualify to do so for at least a couple more years), so that Czech representatives routinely have found themselves not invited to the vital meetings of the Euro-zone that have take place over the past few weeks.

That is why the idea has surfaced – probably from French sources, admittedly – to keep Sarkozy and France on as EU president well into next year, until the beginning of the following year in fact, at least when it comes to financial/economic matters and, as Bos reported at his press conference, discussion about this is ongoing within EU circles. This would be quite a break from 50-year-old EU procedure, of course. As for one country handling financial/economic matters and another handling the rest, how does that work? Where is the boundary-line? Already Germany, the UK, and Luxembourg have indicated that they are not interested in any such thing, the NRC article (with no by-line) reports. The Netherlands, though, if Bos’ remarks are any indication, could find something like that acceptable – provided, however, that the continued independence of the European Central Bank from political influence is guaranteed, something that Sarkozy has tried to undermine in the past.

That any such measure would amount to something of an insult towards the Czech Republic (“Sorry guys: we don’t think you can handle the job!”) is one aspect to which none of the EU leaders who are discussing this plan seem to be devoting much thought. But all of that becomes understandable once again when you remember that the Czech president is still Václav Klaus, who is way down the list of the EU’s favorite national leaders. Long-term readers of this blog will recall that Klaus was rather alarmingly stand-offish about the EU even back just previous to the Czech Republic’s accession referendum in June, 2004. (OK, so maybe in the €S context “long-term reader” is more of a theoretical concept – well, except: Hi Mom! Anyway, if you want to check out my past treatment of Václav Klaus’ rather strained attitude towards the EU, you could start here.) He has adopted the same idea towards the Lisbon Treaty, which he plainly is opposed to: after the “No” in the June Irish referendum, he straight-out declared it to be null-and-void, which is something you’re just not supposed to say in polite EU society.

Topolánek in Danger of Toppling

But it’s not just Václav Klaus, or the fact that the Czech Republic is not in the Euro-zone that has the idea of an upcoming Czech EU presidency making people queasy. In the Czech Republic the president fulfills a mostly ceremonial role as head-of-state (similar to Germany, say, or the UK’s Queen Elizabeth) anyway, and it’s the actual functioning government of premier Mirek Topolánek that is looking shaky, according to a new analysis by Kilian Kirchgessner in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Everyone Vexes Topolánek). Regional elections held last weekend resulted in serious losses for his ODS party, and defections of ODS members of the national legislature from personal loyalty to Topolánek are increasing, to the point that there is a serious risk he will be replaced as party leader. A no-confidence motion against his government in the Czech parliament earlier this week turned out to be premature, but nonetheless Topolánek has even cancelled a visit he was supposed to make to the White House and George W. Bush next week to stay home and try to save his political skin. Maybe there was another, hidden reason for the cancellation, though – and I don’t mean Bush’s increasing lame-duck irrelevance; most friendly world leaders like to visit the White House and get that presidential photo-op no matter what. As Kirchgessner reports in his FR piece, Topolánek, having signed on 8 July the treaty to establish a US-run missile-defense radar site in the Czech Republic, may now be in danger of failing to gain the necessary ratification of that pact from the Czech parliament. Polls show that two-thirds of the Czech population disapproves of the deal; Topolánek’s ODS government went ahead and signed the treaty anyway, but a big part of the success of the opposition parties last weekend stemmed from the public’s unhappiness.

It fell earlier this year to little Slovenia to demonstrate that the EU’s new and small members could still be competent to run the Union’s affairs effectively as President of the Council, and by all accounts they did a good job. (Of course, they had few demands placed on them; and remember that Cyprus will take over the presidency in the second half of 2012! How are we feeling about that?) The Czechs, in contrast, look seriously in danger of dropping the ball for their fellow new member-states. Maybe Sarkozy would be preferable after all.

                          

That’s at least how Marc Pitzke, New York correspondent for Germany’s Der Spiegel, assesses the situation (Palin-effect turns forecasts on their head). He even maintains that the Obama campaign is now in Alarmstimmung – i.e. in a state of alarm – as the final, and toughest, 58-day period of electioneering up to November 4 gets underway. (First, however, there will be a brief non-partisan interlulde as both candidates appear on Thursday at New York City’s “Ground Zero” for a 9/11 anniversary commemoration.)

That Tundra-Trapper is a Game-Changer!

Yes, to Pitzke what McCain managed at the Republican convention was “a brilliant Sarah-Palin coup”; the choice of this “tundra-trapper with a gun-license” was what he has no hesitation in calling “a game-changer,” using the original English. This is primarily because of the motivating effect she already has had on the Republican Party’s Christian fundamentalist base. Whereas the McCain campaign itself has gone for months without being able to generate much enthusiasm among the party’s rank-and-file, now volunteers are joining the campaign at four times the former rate and money is pouring in to the Republican National Committee. (The McCain campaign itself cannot accept any more monetary contributions as of 1 Sept., unfortunately, having opted for public funds.) On a more profound basis, the Obama campaign has apparently lost its former monopoly of a widespread and rabid base of supporters. The enthusiasm gap that used to mark the difference between the two campaigns has closed; the crowd of 13,000 which showed up last weekend at the Colorado Springs, CO airport to great a joint appearance by the GOP candidates is a phenomenon that used to mark only Barack Obama’s campaign appearances. (Except that Colorado Springs is a poor example to use to make this sort of comparison. It’s the site of James Dobson’s evangelical Focus on the Family organization, and what Andrew Sullivan calls “the Christianist world capital.” Talk about going to find a super-friendly choir to preach to!)

By the way, Pitzke uses a small section of his on-line article for the public service of offering a series of summaries of Sarah Palin’s positions on various issues. Don’t get too excited: you won’t find “foreign policy” here, for example, or even “the credit crisis”; the tab headings instead read “Environment,” “Economy,” “Abortion,” “Education,” and “Weapons.” OK, “Environment” and “Abortion” are already easy (she’s against), as is “Weapons” (she’s for). “Education” turns out solely to describe her stated positions against sex-education and for an impartial, evenly-weighted debate between evolution on the one hand and the Biblical account of creation on the other. And then “Economics”: she’s a fiscal conservative who believes in the free market. That’s it, and that “fiscal conservative” claim itself may not stand up to scrutiny.

Now a quick note in passing on our old friend Tom-Jan Meeus and his weblog in the NRC Handelsblad with its latest entry: Why Obama is losing. Why, pray tell? Well, according to him it has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, other than – at a secondary level of importance – through what he calls Hillary Clinton’s present disinclination to attack her. No, Obama’s trouble can be traced to a higher plane, to the grand puppet-master himself, Karl Rove, whose acolytes now leading the McCain campaign have managed to keep him off balance and looking reactive and hesitant, by keeping control of each news-cycle through a steady stream of attacks. As it happens, few of these turn out to have any basis in fact, but that hardly matters, as they nonetheless keep the media-focus relentlessly on Obama. (As usual, Meeus’ writing is very link- and video-intensive, with what little explanatory context he provides naturally in Dutch, but I’m trying here to pass along the gist of his message.)

Karl Rove’s Sheherazade Strategy

Then we turn to the leading and world-famous French newspaper Le Monde and to a quite intriguing article which also looks to the Rove political campaign influence: The return of Karl Rove, scriptwriter, by Christian Salmon. (I realize that accepting this guy as an authentic French journalist, in view of his last name, might seem a fishy proposition – perhaps somewhat of a long roe to hoe – but just stop carping and take the big leap of faith with me on this, up over the rapids.)

For that grand puppet-master has no problem with Sarah Palin as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick – he called her “refreshing.” But that should be no surprise, as she cuts just the figure he needs for his script. What Karl Rove is really the master of, as Prof. Ira Chernus of the University of Colorado tells Salmon, is the “Sheherazade strategy,” something he used to good effect to elect George W. Bush president twice and which he is now executing with the McCain presidential campaign through his representatives. Prof. Chernus explains: “When politics condemns you to death, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so captivating, so bewitching that the king (or, in this case, the American electorate who, in theory, governs the country) forgets about the death sentence.” That political “death sentence” should clearly be in play this election year for the Republican party, after the policy disasters of the last eight years for which they are responsible. Nevertheless, the Rove machine succeeds in coming out with story after story, continually pushing back the execution date by turning politics into a morality play. Such stories invariably depict a great conflict of good-vs.-evil – as Prof. Chernus puts it, “stories in the style of John Wayne and ‘real men’ in combat against devils at the frontier,” but in the end they boil down to the upstanding and moralistic Republicans fighting the degenerate Democrats.

This is a scenario that a character like Sarah Palin – someone so “authentic,” with her all-too-human family – fits into quite naturally. And so the Republicans’ execution date keeps getting postponed again and again, and John McCain comes up even with Barack Obama in the opinion polls.

                          

Oh, Meeus also provides some good links to other on-line Palin stories. (For example: McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000.) The articles linked to are always in English, but of course his description of the links is in Dutch.

                          

If those American journalists had that problem catching up with information on Palin, you can guess the problem was even more acute for the foreign press. Still, European coverage has risen to the challenge with an assortment of treatments of the Alaska governor’s naming – even if I nowhere saw any mention of the budding Alaska state trooper firing scandal that could bring some heavy rain on her parade later on. Anyway, let’s go check that coverage out – starting this time in Poland.

To Marcin Bosacki, the correspondent of Gazeta Wyborcza (Woman McCain’s Vice President), filing from Denver, Palin is “the hero of the [American] anti-abortion movement” for her refusal to abort her latest, fifth child last year when pre-natal tests showed it would like be afflicted with Down’s syndrome. “In present-day America such a choice is a rarity,” he writes. (Remember that Poland does not allow abortion.) And although McCain’s vice-presidential also-rans Romney and Pawlenty are now furious with him for passing them over, what Bosacki characterizes as his “poker-play” does bring two electoral advantages: 1) It assures him of support from religious conservatives, and 2) It should help him attract more votes from female voters disappointed with Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic primaries. Plus, this surprising bit of news enabled the McCain campaign neatly to nip in the bud any further discussion or dwelling upon Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday night before 80,000+ supporters in Denver.

(By the way, Bosacki may be misinformed about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s supposed anger towards McCain in that yesterday, even before the naming of Palin as the vice-presidential pick, he had removed himself from consideration.)

Denmark’s Jyllandsposten brings its readers up-to-speed on Palin (Sarah Palin is McCain’s new partner) with the tantalizing fact that “Palin is known for her talent of riding the snowmobile, and for being an enthusiastic hunter and fisher.” More practical in a political sense is her ironclad opposition to abortion. But an accompanying article – McCain has met his candidate only one time – casts doubt on whether this was a very good choice, pointing out that McCain last met Palin only six months ago, and that for the first time, and that “she is completely without international experience.” It prints prominently comments from Paul Begala, former counselor to President Clinton: “For a man who is 72 and has been afflicted with cancer four times to choose someone who is so completely and utterly unqualified to become president, this is shockingly irresponsible.”

Child-Like Pleasure in the Big Gamble

Coverage by the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad includes a brief treatment by that paper’s weblog by Tom-Jan Meeus covering the American elections (Sarah Palin: Conservatives react), but the primary value-added there are links to Palin’s New York Times editorial of the beginning of this year, urging that polar bears not be declared endangered species, and an embedded YouTube video of one of her television ads when she was running for Alaska’s governor.

More in-depth is the analysis in the paper’s main pages by Meeus and his NRC colleague Merijn de Waal: McCain gambles with an inexperienced running mate. The lede: “With the choice of Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, as running-mate McCain tries to get Hillary’s Clinton’s angry supporters on his side.” “John McCain is a lover of the big gamble,” the editors declare, “with a rebellious streak who takes almost a child-like pleasure in leaving the world – and also friends and close colleagues – behind in complete surprise.” Sure, Palin had been on the lists of potential running-mates over the past months, but no one really took her seriously. Clearly her naming is aimed at still-disenchanted Hillary Clinton supporters, for whom the chance to bring about the first female US vice president might have some appeal – except that a pro-choice position was a strong part of the political make-up of Hillary and her supporters, while both McCain and especially Palin are clearly pro-life. Thus these targeted Hillary-supporters, if they consider voting Republican at all, might still face a perplexing dilemma. Then again, it all might not matter anyway: Meeus and De Waal go quickly through recent American electoral history to build a case that vice-presidential candidates have not really influenced the outcomes of presidential elections, with the case study par excellence being the victory of George H.W. Bush (running-mate: Dan Quayle) over the ticket of Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.

By the way, you might have heard that yesterday was John McCain’s 72nd birthday. It was also the twentieth wedding anniversary of Todd and Sarah Palin, report the NRC editors! To think that she was yanked down to the “lower 48″ to appear in her political “coming out” instead of being able to spend the day with her husband! After all it’s summer, so there probably wasn’t any snowmobile race for him to go compete in, am I right?

She’s Into Guns & Religion

Another Dutch newpaper, De Volkskrant, also carries an extensive analysis by Diederik van Hoogstraten of McCain’s pick (Palin: A Christian who likes to hunt, fish, lead). Yes, to Van Hoogstraten McCain’s selection of Palin also appears to be a gamble, but still one with some upside to it, the primary one being a once-and-for all settling of where the Republican ticket stands on abortion – it is unreservedly against it. But also, while Barack Obama is admittedly a “young and fresh” political figure, in Sarah Palin John McCain has found another one who is even younger and fresher, and someone an Alaska newspaper once called “a refugee from mainstream politics.” Van Hoogstraten also contributes an interesting angle as to why Palin’s evangelical Christian faith together with her love of hunting and fishing are being played up so – her candidacy is the perfect counter-example and rejoinder to the remark Obama made in the spring that got him into so much trouble, the one about Americans resorting to “guns and religion” for solace in difficult times. It’s true that her international exposure is basically zero, and while Van Hoogstraten mentions McCain playing up her “military experience” at the joint presentation yesterday, that “experience” only amounts to being in command of the Alaska National Guard ex oficio as governor. But with her outsider’s track-record and reformist reputation, it’s also possible that Palin could be a means for the McCain campaign to try take over for itself Obama’s brand of bringing the country “Change we can believe in.”

Finally, Dietmar Ostermann at the Frankfurter Rundschau agrees with this last “Change” point (McCain’s Youth Cure). “The signal is clear,” he writes. “McCain completes the break with the Bush years, he escapes the Establishment, and wants to position his Party anew as a force for reform.” Palin brings “youthful freshness” to McCain’s campaign, puts the votes of the Hillary supporters back in play, and will henceforth make it harder for the Democrats to identify McCain with the Bush administration.

                          

If you didn’t have the link, you would have to dig down a bit into the NYT’s on-line Sports section to find that article, since to American audiences the Tour has always been somewhat of an exotic taste, even back in the days when everyone actually believed that it was an authentic athletic competition. In the Netherlands, though – with its documented bike population exceeding that of the country’s human inhabitants – they take it somewhat more seriously, which explains today’s front-page, above-the-fold article in the leading Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad (Epo is always changing its form), by Hester van Santen Maarten Scholten (whew!), that provides an excellent description of the new type of doping for which Ricco was sanctioned, which he evidently (and erroneously) thought he could get away with using.

Epo Through the Generations

Probably the most important concept to be acquainted with here is “Epo” – erythropoietin, a natural hormone that regulates – and so can enhance – human red blood cell production. Epo per se first came on the medical market twenty years ago; more interestingly, the first test to detect it in humans was devised only ten years ago, for, again, it is a natural hormone that the human body produces in naturally in certain small quantities and the challenge was to differentiate the natural Epo from the unnatural. Yes, that effort to come up with an effective test succeeded – but only for what is now known as “first generation” Epo.

The kind that Ricco was caught using, on the other hand (going under the name “Mircera,” a.k.a. “CERA”) is “second generation” and so somewhat different – different enough that the tests for detecting “first generation” were thought not to be able to detect it. It’s not like Mircera is any more effective in its red-blood-cell-enhancing role than previous versions of Epo; it’s not any more or less safe to use; it’s just that it is new, having come onto the market only last year. (Presumably after last year’s similarly scandal-plagued Tour de France – oh yes, Mircera does have another point in its favor, namely that it only needs to be administered – by injection – at most twice a month.)

Luckily, though, it seems that the anti-doping agencies managed to catch up with this “second generation” Epo just in time, at least to catch Signor Ricco and a couple others this year (so far). Actually, in her article Ms. Scholten claims that, once a laboratory is set up to look for it, Mircera is actually even easier to detect than other Epos in that urine samples will exhibit not only Mircera itself but also a certain chemical signature that also hints at its presence. No worries though: according to the World Anti-Doping Agency “third generation” Epos are well on their way, such as a so-called “Hematide” – “remember that name,” Ms. Scholten advises the reader as she closes off her article.

Oh Yes, We’ll Be Sure to Remember

“Remember that name” indeed; what she means, of course, is that Hematide (or some other third-generation hormone) will inevitably be the medicinal trademark dominating next year’s Tour de France, as “tradition” and overwhelming financial interests insist that the farce be staged again and a whole new passel of riders are caught competing unfairly. Another thing to remember is that the detection capabilities of the available chemical tests are not the only decisive variable in trying to make the competition “clean” – also important is the system the Tour uses as to whom and how often it actually applies such tests. It is on this subject that another anti-doping expert has grave doubts, namely Rasmus Damsgaard, the scientist behind the anti-doping program of the Danish cycling team CSC Saxo Banks, as expressed to Jyllandsposten (Expert: A Third of the Tour Could Be Doped). See, before Ricco was recently caught, the only other two riders expelled from the tour this year for doping were relatively small fry that no one had ever heard of: Moises Duenas Navaro and Manuel Beltran. You see, Tour officials don’t really test very extensively for doping, in Damsgaard’s view – they just test “randomly.” “I shudder to think of it,” he told Jyllandsposten, “but if the Tour authorities took an Epo-test from all riders in the morning, I would be afraid that 10, 20, maybe 30 percent of all riders would test positive.” But they never have done that.

Denmark is also a “bicycling country” par excellence which, like the Netherlands, has a proud tradition in cycling and forwards many teams to the leading competitions, but it seems even there disillusion over doping is approaching critical mass. The same Jyllandsposten recently posted an article entitled Readers: Hard to take the Tour seriously where one Gitte Anderson contributed what could be termed a modern-day cycling catechism:

What do I think when someone is just about to win a race-stage?

Answer: They must be on Epo.

What do I think when the eventual tour winner cycles to the finish line?

Answer: Why should I be glad, in four years they’ll find out that he was on Epo.

What do I think when the Tour de France is over?

Answer: I’d like to know what will be dug up afterward this time (such as the Bjarne Riis scandal, for example).

. . .

What do I think in general about the Tour de France?

Answer: This is in general a rubbish-sport, whoever wins is probably on Epo, so why look at it, it’s a pure waste of time.

Meanwhile, over on the web-pages of one of Denmark’s other main general-interest newspapers, Politiken, the sports editor feels the need to explain to readers why his outfit will continue to cover the Tour (Editor: Here’s why we will still cover the Tour). OK, why? Because cycle sports are part of reality, that Politiken is supposed to cover for its readers. Ignoring it just because some riders use doping would be like ignoring business news just because some businessmen are criminals. Our reporting can still be marked by a stance that deplores the fact that cycle sports evidently are not able to extricate themselves from this situation.

Maybe Execute Doping Offenders?

Well: there you are. But that doesn’t mean you or I have to read, watch, or listen about any cycling event. Anyway, time moves on and the Tour de France will eventually pass the spotlight on to the next doping event, which this year is a biggie – I mean, of course, the Peking Olympic Games! You can rest assured of EuroSavant coverage of the upcoming track-and-field, etc. doping scandals ready to burst upon the Peking scene, just as you can bet your bottom dollar that such scandals will be forthcoming.

Or will they? A recent article from Belgium’s Gazet van Antwerpen (Olympic Games Put a Knife to the Throat of Drugsdealers) reminds us of the Chinese government’s world-famous hard-line attitude towards drug dealers – mainly extensive use of the death penalty. Now, it’s true that the drugs mentioned in the article as being dealt are only the usual ones: mainly heroin, but also newer lab-produced drugs like methamfetamines (“ice”) and ketamine. No mention here of doping drugs – but maybe the Chinese authorities intend to include them? That could be a very interesting experiment in how to clean “doping” out of sports – stay tuned!