Prescience and Gravitas.

Two traits I would not mind seeing return in an American president; enough already with the good-time Charlies...

By DAN BILEFSKY and CLAIRE BARTHELEMY -- JAN. 27, 2016

LONDON — He incensed Paris and London by saying that some of their neighborhoods were so overrun with radicals that the police were too scared to enter.

He raised Scottish tempers by threatening to pull the plug on his investments there, including his luxury golf courses, if British politicians barred him from entering Britain.

Now Donald J. Trump has upset the already beleaguered people of Belgium, calling its capital, Brussels, “a hellhole.”

Asked by the Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo about the feasibility of his proposal to bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States, Mr. Trump argued that Belgium and France had been blighted by the failure of Muslims in these countries to integrate.

“ There is something going on, Maria,” he said. “Go to Brussels. Go to Paris. Go to different places. There is something going on and it’s not good, where they want Shariah law, where they want this, where they want things that — you know, there has to be some assimilation. There is no assimilation. There is something bad going on.”

Maybe it's time to stop being polite,
and start getting real? The Real World awaits...

Jean-Philippe Schreiber, a historian at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, said Mr. Trump was stirring up xenophobia. Brussels has its problems, he added, but Mr. Trump’s “hyperbolic” comments were not worthy of a response.

 

Indeed, Belgians could be forgiven for their sense of wounded pride. First, there is the beer, the galaxy of Michelin starred-restaurants, and a thriving design and art scene. Brussels also hosts its beloved Manneken Pis, a 17th-century bronze statue of a little boy urinating.

 

Channeling Mr. Trump’s provocative swagger, Mark Meirsman, a Belgian who works for the European Parliament, but who emphasized that he was writing in his personal capacity, wrote on Facebook that Mr. Trump should stand next to the Manneken Pis the next time he finds himself in Brussels (though not, Mr. Meirsman stressed, as president).

Not so funny today, eh?