Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Thomas Friedman, star columnist of the New York Times, is watching today's presidential inauguration from Paris, the capital of "the world's biggest blue state" — Europe. "This whole region is a rhapsody in blue," says Friedman and notes:

"Before Mr. Bush's re-election, the prevailing attitude in Europe was definitely: 'We're not anti-American. We're anti-Bush.' But now that the American people have voted to re-elect Mr. Bush, Europe has a problem maintaining this distinction. The logic of the Europeans' position is that they should now be anti-American, not just anti-Bush, but most Europeans don't seem to want to go there. They know America is more complex."

Really? Meanwhile, in "the ultimate red state", Iran, "many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq," writes Friedman:

"An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were 'loving anything their government hates,' such as Mr. Bush, 'and hating anything their government loves.' Tehran is festooned in 'Down With America' graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt."

Observations, there, by "An American in Paris". From New York to Paris to Teheran and now back in Washington, where there's disenchantment for the rhapsodic blues but hope for the ultimate reds:

"Dr Rice said that although things had not always gone as expected in Iraq, the decision to go to war was right, and that the world was better off with Saddam Hussein's removal from power. She argued that though no weapons of mass destruction were found after the war, the WMD threat was not the only justification for it."

As Norm said, when she's right... she's right.