Mark Steyn, columnist extraordinaire for the Chicago Sun-Times and a number of other publications around the world, puts his erudition to savagely funny use in today's London Telegraph. Using the quirky story of an avalanche survivor as an apt analogy, Steyn perfectly describes the European response to Bush's expansion of democracy ... and gives a new context for the term 'European' as well:

I was very moved by the story of Mr Richard Kral, a Slovak gentleman found staggering drunk down a snowy trail a few days back. He'd been motoring through the Tatra Mountains in his Audi when he got buried by an avalanche. Opening the window and frantically clawing at the snow, he grasped that he couldn't dig his way out faster than the white stuff would come into the car and bury him. So he looked around and his eye fell on the 60 half-litre bottles of beer he happened to have with him. He had a drink and midway through realised that he could urinate on the snow to melt it.

And he did: "Man Peed Way out of Avalanche," as one headline put it. "It was hard," the plucky Slovak told the local press, "and now my kidneys and liver hurt."

I read that item on January 29. The next day Iraq voted and, scanning the coverage from Toronto to Sydney via Dublin, London, Paris and Berlin, I had an eerie sense of déjà vu. The Western media appear to have decided that any good news out of Iraq is one almighty neocon snow job and the only thing to do is emulate Mr Kral and urinate all over it.

Alas, they've got a much tougher job. The snow is still coming down, and they've got nothing in the back of the car except the same watery beer they've been chugging for three years: "They Are Waiting for the Rivers of Blood," proclaimed the headline over Robert Fisk's column in the Independent, another classic for fans of the beloved comic genius to cut out and add to treasured clippings - such as his coverage of the Afghan war ("Bush Is Walking into a Trap") and his confident assertion that there were no Americans at Baghdad airport and that the blundering Yanks had merely stumbled upon an abandoned RAF airfield from the 1950s.

As it transpired, the only folks waiting for the rivers of blood were Fisky, the BBC, CNN and the rest of the gang, and they'll be waiting a long time. So long that, in the Guardian, Martin Jacques has moved on to penning orgasmic fantasies of the mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.

Of course, we have seen in the Eason's Fables scandal the reasons why the media has such blinders about American policy. They put their pre-existing biases into their reporting, going as far as making wild, unsubstantiated allegations of conspiracies, assassinations, and torture when they think no one is listening but themselves.

Read the rest of Steyn's column. We'll be talking with him tonight when the Northern Alliance Radio Network fills in again for Hugh Hewitt.

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