perfidy

No this isn't from some Buchananite wacko. It's from Italy's reform minister, Umberto Bossi.

Mr Bossi, leader of the Northern League, said Brussels was "transforming vices into virtues" and "advancing the cause of atheism every day". He denounced the European arrest warrant as a step towards "dictatorship, deportation, and terror, instilling fear in the people, a crime in itself". It would lead to a Stalinist regime "multiplied by 25".

One day Italian citizens would be locked up on the orders of Turkish judges, he told Il Giornale newspaper, which is owned by the family of the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He added that the euro was a "total flop", its inflationary effects costing ordinary people "a fortune" in lost purchasing power.

I don't know if I agree completely, but I have my suspicions - on bad days, I agree with Rachel Lucas, and wish that the EU would just declare itself a fascist dictatorship so we could go over and kick their ass and get it over with.

The new draft EU constitution contains none of the protections for individual liberty that we enjoy here. The tendency of EU bureaucrats to take action without consulting the public - or even thinking about consulting the public, is worrisome as well. The unelected officials who form the nascent European federal government are completely removed from any kind of accountablility to the citizens of the several European nations.

It might be a good thing if some Europeans got together with a copy of the Federalist Papers, the Notes from the Constitutional Convention, and a lot of red pens.

It is surprising to me that the drafters of the new European constitution have paid so little attention to the lessons of our constitution - given that there are so many parallels. In both cases, there are a number of different soveriegn states, varying in size, population and wealth. There are issues of free trade and common currency. There are debates about the optimal miz of central and state power.

Of course, they may have paid attention, and decided that a representative democracy that devolved power to the masses and allowed maximal freedom for the individual; and enshrined notions of limited government inviolable rights is not what they wanted.