New York
God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as the Israeli ‘existential threat’. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, and Big Bagel papers present the Iran problem as 1939 and the Nazis having the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in a report by the IMF, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy and the statuesque Merkel did? They did to it what I’d like to do to The Spectator’s deputy editor, squashed it and shoved it into a very dark room where no one could find it. Instead of pricking the boil — or boiling the prick, for that matter — they let it fester. This is the way of great men and women. Like Alexander the Great in front of the Gordian knot, they decided to let it be for a while. The champion of the non-action was Jean-Claude Trichet — his surname means cheat.
What I would like to know is how stupendously stupid and over-the-top dumb we — the so-called people — are? How human beings so lacking in brain function can summon the ability to walk or talk, no less realise that we are being taken for the ride of our lives by the crooks of Brussels? These glassy-eyed ghouls knew all along what the Greek crooks were up to, but kept shtoom for political expedience. The great Greek economist Taki wrote about the problem in these here pages, warning that the politicians were lying and then some, but, like Enoch’s prophecy, it went unheeded. In the meantime, two years have been wasted while Greek politicians have been zipping around on freebies looking awfully busy and doing nothing. Take it from Taki: because of all the denials, lies and delays, Greece will need to write down 85 per cent of her debt, 50 per cent not being even close.
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