Just What the Order Doctored

Soeren Kern writing on his own site and in the Brussels Journal makes clear for us all what has become obvious by drips: the EU doesn not only not lend itself to any sort of democracy other than a Potemkin village of symbolism and plenary plentitudes, but its’ leaders seem to rather prefer to meet in a (now unlawful) smoke-filled room to select it’s non-titular lider maximo free of the burden of public knowledge.

Leaders of the 27 member states of the European Union are meeting in Brussels on November 19 to choose the first-ever European president and European foreign minister. European political elites say these two new jobs are needed so that the notoriously divided EU can begin speak with one voice on the global stage. Once that happens, they contend, the EU will assume its rightful role as a world superpower and act as a counter-balance to the United States.

Choices Made With “Succession by Palace Coup” as their Ideal

As if hoping for some sort of Ernst Blofeld-like Evil Genius who will restore their egos to it’s rightful place as emotional rulers of the globe, Kern compares the process of selection rather favorably to those that place in the Soviet Union where the 99,9% votes for the people’s man were thought to become more plausible over time.

Today, these so-called Eurocrats oversee more than 100,000 pages of EU legislation, much of which has primacy over national legislation and parliaments. Indeed, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels now exercise so much power that they dictate what elected leaders can or cannot do in more than 30 policy areas.

Kern is giving them too much credit. The public actually knows about this affair to a degree, and the press has found it fit to discuss in the manner of a “who’s hot and who’s not thing” after the fashion of a gossip magazine printed on newsprint. Complaints about the lack of a public voice in all of this is people characterized as mumbling neurotic who know not what they say. Soon these reprobate Democracy-fetishists will surely have a nice, warm, comforting Sanitarium bed, for all three of them.

In the absence of a consensus candidate, the contest has degenerated into a race to the bottom. In secretive backroom horse-trading, the center-right, which controls the European Parliament, has staked its claim to the presidency; the center-left will get the foreign policy job. There are now half a dozen or more contenders for both jobs. And the one thing all the candidates have in common is that they are virtually unknown outside of Europe.

So much for that policy of truth stuff that their parents never taught them. After all, think about it, if public acclimation was required, they might miss out on THIS gem of a Cub Scout Den Mother:

The leading hopeful for the presidency is Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, whose biggest claim to fame is writing haiku poetry in his native Dutch. According to the London-based Economist magazine, Van Rompuy’s main foreign policy experience stems from his involvement in a Belgo-Dutch row over the dredging of the River Scheldt.

High-minded, fresh thinking stuff that will define the 21st century world as they imagine, no doubt but the matter of precedents and examples doesn’t speak well for the future if this is the heady and philosophically pure point from which future corruption of the dream will ensue:

The London-based Telegraph newspaper quotes another Eastern European official as complaining: “Trying to work out who is going to be President of the EU Council is not dissimilar to decoding who was in or out in the Kremlin in the 1970s. It seems strange to many of us that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we have to dust off our Kremlinology skills here in Brussels.”