Derek wrote: Now can we please stop this right wing, redneck, American
rhetoric and get back to gliding?

Hey dip****, who started this whole thing? Wake the hell up! You need a
good old-fashioned, right-wing, redneck boot up your @$$!

Practice what you preach, commie boy. Stick to soaring.

Again... What a moron.

Jack Womack
Hammermill wrote:
Derek Copeland wrote:
Well at least we generally ran the British Empire in
a reasonably civilised manner, although I admit there
were a few blips in India. Most of our former colonies,
with the exception of yourselves, have remained voluntarily
in an organisation called the 'British Commonwealth'
and accept our Queen as nominal Head of State. These
include Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several
of the West Indian islands. I would suggest that these
are amongst the most civilised countries in the World.


The Gents below have only confirmed our view of Americans
as being loud, arrogant and rude! OK, I know most of
you are very nice.
The politics are starting to impinge on my flying,
as UK taxation has been significantly increased by
stealth (standard 'New Labour' tactic) to pay for armies
of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of
petrol and hence travel has also increased to record
levels. Wasn't one of the objectives of the Iraq War
to stop this happening?

Derek Copeland

WASHINGTON -- In the Australian House of Representatives last month,
opposition member Julia Gillard interrupted a speech by the minister of
health thusly: ``I move that that sniveling grub over there be not
further heard.''

For that, the good woman was ordered removed from the House, if only
for a day. She might have escaped that little time-out if she had
responded to the speaker's demand for an apology with something other
than ``If I have offended grubs, I withdraw unconditionally.''

God, I love Australia. Where else do you have a shadow health minister
with such, er, starch? Of course I'm prejudiced, having married an
Australian, but how not to like a country, in this age of sniveling
grubs worldwide, whose treasurer suggests to any person who ``wants to
live under sharia law'' to try Saudi Arabia and Iran, ``but not
Australia.'' He was elaborating on an earlier suggestion that ``people
who ... don't want to live by Australian values and understand them,
well then they can basically clear off.'' Contrast this with Canada,
historically and culturally Australia's commonwealth twin, where last
year Ontario actually gave serious consideration to allowing its
Muslims to live under sharia law.

Such things don't happen in Australia. This is a place where, when the
remains of a fallen soldier are accidentally switched with those of a
Bosnian, the enraged widow picks up the phone late at night, calls the
prime minister at home in bed and delivers a furious unedited rant --
which he publicly and graciously accepts as fully deserved. Where
Americans today sue, Australians slash and skewer.

For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we
gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor.
Australia evokes an echo of our own frontier, which is why Australia is
the only place you can unironically still shoot a Western.

It is surely the only place where you hear officials speaking plainly
in defense of action. What other foreign minister but Australia's would
see through ``multilateralism,'' the fetish of every sniveling foreign
policy grub from the Quai d'Orsay to Foggy Bottom, calling it correctly
``a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving
internationalism of the lowest common denominator''?

And with action comes bravery, from the transcendent courage of the
doomed at Gallipoli to the playful insanity of Australian-rules
football. How can you not like a country whose trademark sport has
Attila-the-Hun rules, short pants and no padding -- a national passion
that makes American football look positively pastoral?

That bravery breeds affection in America for another reason as well.
Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in
every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the
winning and the losing.

Why? Because Australia's geographic and historical isolation has bred a
wisdom about the structure of peace -- a wisdom that eludes most other
countries. Australia has no illusions about the ``international
community'' and its feckless institutions. An island of tranquility in
a roiling region, Australia understands that peace and prosperity do
not come with the air we breathe, but are maintained by power -- once
the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States.

Australia joined the faraway wars of early-20th-century Europe not out
of imperial nostalgia, but out of a deep understanding that its fate
and the fate of liberty were intimately bound with that of the British
Empire as principal underwriter of the international system. Today the
underwriter is America, and Australia understands that an American
retreat or defeat -- a chastening consummation devoutly, if secretly,
wished by many a Western ally -- would be catastrophic for Australia
and for the world.

When Australian ambassadors in Washington express support for the U.S.,
it is heartfelt and unalloyed, never the ``yes, but'' of the other
allies, perfunctory support followed by a list of complaints, slights
and sage finger-wagging. Australia understands America's role and is
sympathetic to its predicament as reluctant hegemon. That understanding
has led it to share foxholes with Americans from Korea to Kabul. They
fought with us at Tet and now in Baghdad. Not every engagement has
ended well. But every one was strenuous, and many quite friendless.
Which is why America has such affection for a country whose prime
minister said after 9/11, ``This is no time to be an 80 percent ally,''
and actually meant it. Charles Krauthammer