Joe Hoeffel;
Anti-Cowboy
by
Wayne Lutz
March 18, 2004
Ol' Liberal Joe is at it again.
Man just can't keep from flappin' his gums about "cowboys" every
chance he gets. Must be some kind of fetish.
"What we have seen in Iraq is when foreign policy does things the wrong way," Hoeffel said recently. "It's Cowboy Diplomacy." - Northeast Breeze
"[Hoeffel] said President Bush's "cowboy diplomacy" had alienated key allies like France, Germany and Russia." - AP
"Their arrogance, unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy have reduced our stature in the world and made us less secure." - Politics PA
"There was an arrogant unilateral approach to our diplomacy, what I called at the time a cowboy diplomacy..." - Hoeffel, Congressional Record
You get the idea.
Hoeffel is the Democratic Congressman from the 13th district in Pennsylvania. He's also a liberal's liberal, cast from the same mold as John Kerry (the mold is a waffle-iron). Now he's giving up his House seat to run for the Senate in a fantasy bid to unseat Arlan Spector. Presumably, having run through the already meager supply of cowboys in the affluent Philadelphia suburbs, Hoeffel hears a calling to ride forth and sterilize that vast expanse of cowboy country between Philadelphia and Harrisburg.
You might wonder just what it is that ol' Joe has against cowboys. Time was that the anti-cowboy was the bad guy. Remember that? Maybe you don't. That was back in the days when a man was a man and a liberal was someone with a live and let live mentality.
Now, "cowboy" has become a pejorative, apparently. But why? The cowboy is quintessentially American. The cowboy is
the very symbol of independence and respect for individual merit; they are square shooters, upright, and honest men. As I've written elsewhere, Americans are heirs to the cowboy tradition of courage and perseverance in the face of a challenge, and products of the high ideals of freedom and progress that galvanized us to tame a continent.
How could those qualities possibly be considered something to look down upon?
I'll answer my own question. They aren't. Or, at least, those qualities - the cowboy -is not looked down upon by mainstream America. Quite to the contrary.
But note the qualifier "mainstream America." The only people who spit the word "cowboy" as if they'd got a mouthful of bad chawin' tobacco are Northeastern liberals and ...Europeans.
Europeans may love Western films (or, at least the Germans and Italians do, if my own experience, anecdotal though it may be, can be taken as evidence) but they despise cowboys. (Figure that one out.) Even before the war to liberate Iraq, European leaders were airily dismissing President Bush as a bungling, inept cowboy, hardly fit for polite company. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't even do afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches. How...uncivilized.
Far more civilized to appease tyrants and terrorists as the tanks roll down the boulevard and the mass-transit system is blown to little pieces. Far more civilized to safeguard the lining of one's own pockets with billions in blood money by ensuring that an entire nation is kept in bondage to a despot so as not to disrupt one's own little illicit business ventures.
Far more civilized to be an enlightened socialist who sneers at (or fears?) the "cowboy diplomacy" of the only remaining free nation on Earth. Which brings me back to Joe Hoeffel (and his fellow closet Frenchmen).
Listening to Hoeffel, I often find myself straining to hear if he's hiding a French accent. The disdain that Hoeffel repeatedly displays for cowboys (a big chunk of America, Joe. Not a smart political stance.) is matched only by his love of the United Nations. Hoeffel is one of those anti-cowboy European wannabes who believes that American foreign policy should be dictated by the U.N. and our European "allies."
So opposed to "cowboy diplomacy" is Joe that he was named an "Enemy of U.S. Sovereignty" by the American Policy Center - one of 134 legislators who failed to support any of five legislative initiatives that sought to protect national sovereignty -the right of the United States to maintain its independent status among nations. Perhaps the most egregious, and frightening, of these was Hoeffel's vote against H.R. 1794: the American Servicemembers Protection Act, an amendment to the State Department appropriations bill that provides legal protections to ensure that American citizens, especially military personnel, are not prosecuted by the UN’s International Criminal Court.
Hoeffel seems to think that the International Criminal Courts is a dandy idea, and that we have no right to protect ourselves without the approval of the Socialist ruling class. To do so would be terribly distasteful. It would be cowboy diplomacy, and we can't have that.
In fact, Mr. Hoeffel,
and as the little blonde filly in the photo above says, we need more
cowboys in the Senate, not more smartypants Ted Kennedy/John/Kerry/Jacques
Chirac clones. The
times, they may be a-changin', Congressman, but one thing remains the same
- the anti-cowboy still wears the black hat in these parts.
