Enough Already

I'm getting thoroughly sick and tired of all the witless Lerner and Loewe jokes I keep coming across in blog posts and opinion pieces about Spain. There's only one of them that's any damn good - you'll find it if you scroll down the page a little. As for the rest, the headline of Ann Coulter's bilious offering at Yahoo is pretty typical. It's another one of those "the Spanish have no cojones" pieces. At least Coulter has the good sense to recognise the lameness of the joke in her headline; by the end of her piece she's abandoned Lerner and Loewe in favour of a humorous riff on a theme from Rogers and Hammerstein:

No matter how many of our European allies may surrender to the terrorists, America will never be alone. This is a country founded in a covenant with God by people who had to flee Europe to do it.

Sailing to the New World in 1630 on the ship Arabella, the Puritans' leader and governor, John Winthrop, said Americans were entering into a covenant with God to create a "city upon a hill." We would be judged by all the world if we ever broke that covenant. But if we walked with God, "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies." He has intervened in our affairs before, such as in 1776, 1861 and 1980.

With the Spanish election, we are witnessing a capitulation to savagery that makes full-scale war inevitable. The Democratic candidate wants to represent godless Europeans. The Republican candidate wants to represent Americans. As Winthrop said: "The eyes of all people are upon us."

I had to check out the dates to work out which historical events Coulter believes show divine intervention in American affairs. 1776 was, as I vaguely remember from high school history, the year of the Declaration of Independence. 1861 was the year the American Civil War started and in 1980 Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as President. God truly does work in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.