Tim Blair

Over 60 million people voted for W.

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Stray goop stuck in the middle of the link. Correct link is: here.

Victorian values had a number of advantages. Of course, they didn't for the people who didn't follow them. But for those who did, it worked out.
There're enough ways to screw yourself up without breaking rules which have the benefit of ten thousand years of social experience. Go ahead, covet your neighbor's wife and see how your life improves.
I suspect Freud might be of some use trying to figure out the origin of the enormous energy expended in building a society and expanding which was simultaneous with Victorian mores.
You can look at the lotus-eaters and tell us who's getting someplace and who thinks they're already there, but are really noplace.
Anyway, Brits are free to laugh at our quaint ways. They should make sure to write to us telling us, so we know.

"Yet all is forgiven," I thought in Normandy last May, when I saw for the first time America's vast military cemetery near the beach at Omaha. So it should be.

Mr. Deedes speaks well, and I thank him for it. But how many of his fellow citizens have made the same trip, and the same conclusion? Enough so that they remember just what caused WWII in the first place, the next time some British paper directs their ire at the "Dumb Americans"?

I don't recall any such character in 'Brideshead Revisited'. Is he perhaps thinking of a character in the 'Sword of Honour' trilogy?

We pumped all those US dollars into their economy, freshened up their DNA, and this is the thanks we get?

"Over-paid, over-sexed and over here"

I believe the correct response from the GI's to the English allies was that they were:

"Underpaid, Undersexed and Under Eisenhower"

I find it odd that the British are shitty on the Yanks for helping them to save their once great nation.

The Yanks also came out here to the land of Oz and helped to save our sorry arses (whilst we taught them jungle warfare) but apart from the usual lefty morons most Aussies I know like the Merricans.

I guess we are more like the Yanks than the Brits.

It's refreshing to see friends overseas.

I am glad to see that our brave men on the USS Peary didn't die in vain.

Fluent, have you ever considered the Brits are screaming so loud at US because they can't scream at anyone at home?

Their hate speech laws would throw them in jail pronto.

We're the safe outlet. And they know we'll be there.

Good on ya deedes and good on ya the london daily telegraph on being the last line of defence on the madness that engulfes "grest Britain".
And yes loss of morality and the old values is what has resulted in the european acceptance of beheadings, suicide bombings, slaughter of women and children etc etc as legitimate forms of defence against the evils of "western imperialism"
40 years ago one can imagine what headlines and copy such horrors would have generated in the MSM of the day!

Sandy P. -

I've never had the slightest difficulty in screaming at anyone I wanted to here in London, and nobody has ever threatened me with hate speech laws.

Whereas when I was at UCLA, I felt myself in danger of being lynched for referring to blacks as blacks, not African-Americans. And as for the time I innocently called Native Americans Indians ...

Fluent Idiot's description of Australia actually perfectly fits England. Anti-American feeling here simply isn't widespread, and Americans I've met here have no problems, because most people have the elementary manners necessary to distinguish between disagreeing with America's goverment and being rude to America's citizens. OK, so there's the occasional asshole who doesn't, just as I've been hassled in America by people who call themselves "Irish", but I'd be amazed if it were worse here than in Australia and it's certainly a million miles better than anywhere on continental Europe.

See, I don't mind British words so much. It's a blow to pride to go from the world's superpower to needing help from people who rebelled against you. Compensations are to be expected -- and British deeds have always been up to snuff.

Now, the French -- well, they seem to have learned well from Metternich to astonish the world with their ingratitude. Or maybe they resent that we broke up Hitler's restoration of Charlemagne's Frankenreich . . .

Fluent Idiot, I think as individuals we are probably more sunny and optimistic like Americans rather than the poor old British worrying about the weather, sitting in smoky pubs, but as a society I think we are still more British than American. You know, judges wear wigs, cricket is a religion, etc etc. Sound things that will last longer in Australia than they will in Britain, probably.

Tony Abbott once gave a speech where he cited a demographer that argued that second to Britain, Australia in 2004 was the most British country in the world. I think you can find it on his website.

Lord (Bill) Deedes (ex Torygraph editor, Conservative minister, now a peer) wrote a wonderful book, Brief Lives, about some of the fascinating people he met over about 50 years of public life and journalism. It was available a few months through the Telegraph. Well worth a read if you can get your hands on a copy.

"Over-paid, over-sexed and over here"

It hurts to think we weren't the only ones who used the phrase.

Bloody whinging Poms!

I have heard that the Japanese have seven words for gratitude - expressing various degrees of ill feeling.

As for me, I am grateful (not in the Japanese sense) to Henry VIII for successfully telling the Pope he was just another man, if a powerful one. Not that Henry was a man to emulate...

I'm all for those Victorian values, especially since there were more brothels in London at the end of the 19th century than at any other time in England's history. Once those celluloid collars and whalebone stays came off, baby, those people partied like it was 1899...

Perhaps twenty five years ago I wandered into a small pub in Kensington. A couple of old timer Brits were there having their pints and spied me. "Yank are you?" "Yessir, here to enjoy the weather." "Well, now, you sit right here and don't move until you can't move." They proceeded to thank me for what America had done for them and protest as I might, that I was only 10 years old in 1945, they were bound to get me pissed, and a fine job they did! No anti americanism in that pub that night!