While Nero fiddles

From Maureen Dowd

The Bushes don’t connect words with action. Action is something that’s secretly plotted with the inner circle behind closed doors. The public should stay out of it. The Bushes just connect words with salesmanship.

Poppy Bush never meant it when he said “Read my lips: no new taxes” at the 1988 convention. It was just a Clint Eastwood-sounding line in a Peggy Noonan speech, meant to pump up his flighty image.

Just so, his son never paid any mind to his campaign promise not to nation-build, and he didn’t come through on his bullhorn pledge to catch the perpetrators of 9/11 or his tough-guy vow to bring in Osama dead or alive.

From Thomas Friedman

When Europeans tell you that they fear a new “cold war,” this time they really are talking about the temperature — and the fear that Russia, if it wanted to turn off the gas, could make Europeans very cold. About 40 percent of Europe’s natural gas imports come from Russia, and that is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2030.

With prices high, Russia has gone from the sick man of Europe to the boss man. Russia is a having a much bigger impact on Western Europe “with gas pipelines than it ever had with SS-20” long-range nuclear missiles, remarked the German foreign-policy expert Josef Joffe, author of the smart book “Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America.”