Hang on in there, Mr Brown. Europe needs you for a while yet. The alternative could be a Conservative prime minister leading Britain towards the European exit. Such are the whispered anxieties in continental capitals, and among pro-Europeans in Britain, as Gordon Brown's troubles stir speculation about an early general election.(...) the leaders in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere have selfish reasons for hoping that the present British government can stagger on until next year. They have spent the best part of a decade designing, redesigning and patching up an agreement to remake the European Union's institutions. Once it was called the European constitution; now it goes by the name of the Lisbon treaty. But, horror of horrors, with the end at last in sight, David Cameron's Conservatives are threatening to wreck the project.(...) The timing of the government's demise could mark the difference between a serious argument about Britain's relationship with Brussels and a rupture that would set in train its eventual departure.(...) It is clear to all that Mr Cameron wants to derail the process of European integration. His decision to withdraw from the European People's party, the European parliament's mainstream centre-right group, is a step in that direction. By aligning with a hotchpotch of small far-right parties, Mr Cameron has downgraded his party's relationship with its French and German cousins. To move Britain to the sidelines of influence is one thing. To threaten to blow up the Lisbon accord is another. This is what Mr Cameron proposes by pledging to campaign for its rejection in a British referendum. And this is where the timing of the general election really matters.(...) Mr Cameron might argue that earlier versions of the treaty were rejected in referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland. But these were not conscious acts of government. Withdrawal from the EPP is a Tory shot across the bows of European integrationists. Wrecking the Lisbon treaty would be a declaration of war.(...) One thing is certain: neither Britain nor Europe needs an autumn general election. Nor, unless he wants to sleepwalk towards Europe's exit, does Mr Cameron.

This is certainly the year that a lot of stereotypes have bitten the dust: of course the top of the list of broken prejudices is symbolized by our president, Barack Obama, the first person of known African descent to occupy the Oval Office and soon we will have the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.

This is wonderful. But the destruction of other stereotypes, though they fill the observer with wonder are anything but wonderful.

Max Blumenthal's little film "Feeling the Hate" has broken more stereotypes for me, personally, than the election of Barack Obama or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

The success of either Obama or Sotomayor is no surprise to me on racial or ethnic grounds, as I have never thought that the color of a person's skin or ethnic origin had any bearing on their ability to carry out the duties and responsibilities of high office.

However, I also never thought I would ever hear Jewish people throw the word "nigger" around with such practiced aplomb as in this video.

As a matter of fact, I don't ever remember seeing a Jewish person as drunk as those portrayed in Blumenthal's interviews in my whole life; in my youth it was proverbial that, "Jews don't drink": getting roaring drunk was something that was left to brutish, wife-beating, Polish peasants and to feral Russian Cossacks.

So here, thanks to Mr. Blumenthal, we have a group of future "my son the doctor(s)" and Jewish Princesses, stumbling drunk, talking with the same disgusting bigotry as the Polish peasants and Russian Cossacks that used to rape their great grandmothers or the rednecks that spat on the Jewish Freedom riders in the 1960s or that lynched Leo Frank.

To whom do we owe this transformation, this leveling?

To the USA?

To Israel?

In the words of a great American poet, "C'est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell".