One of the many nice people I recently met in Europe was the Scandanavian blogger  Snaphanen. Having just visited his site--mainly in Danish, alas for me, although I notice he was kind enough to put up yesterday's post--I have come away with this video clip (above) taken from BBC's Newsnight. It is an interview with Margot Wallstrom, conducted in the wake of the spunky Irish No Vote against ratification of the EU's Orwellian Lisbon Treaty earlier this month. Wallstrom is a high EU official who, like other high EU officials, simply doesn't care whether EU-member states ratify the Lisbon Treaty: They will push it through regardless of  things like plebiscites, people's will, stuff like that.

The question she repeatedly and fascinatingly dodges in this clip is what  voters in Europe can  do to stop the Lisbon Treaty. Her point is: Nothing.

Which just goes to illustrate a line from this week's column, not yet out:

Such differences have helped turn Europe into the European Union, a nation-destroying behemoth both driven and empowered by the infantilizing machinery of the welfare state. Indeed, so shockingly totalitarian is the orientation of the EU, it strikes me that President Bush’s misguided effort to democratize the Islamic Middle East might well have been better aimed at liberating the hostage peoples of the Brussels-dominated supra-state.

Note to Death of the Grown-Up readers: Wallstrom appears in Chapter 7, Identity,  pp. 133-134:

Margot Wallstrom, a senior official of the European Union (EU), took the occasion of VE-Day 2005 to condemn the concept of nationalism itself--not Hitler, not the democracies' appeasement of Hitler--for causing the outbreak of the World War II. She accused Europeans reluctant to cede their sovreignty--or, as she put it, their "nationalistic pride"--to the supranational and antidemocratic EU bureacracy as risking a return to Nazism and the Holocaust....