YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO SUBMIT:

Fate of EU treaty hangs on Irish referendum (Sarah Lyall, June 12, 2008, NY Times)

In a nutshell, that is the problem confronting the treaty's proponents as the Irish head for the polls in a referendum being watched across Europe. At 287 pages of vintage bureaucratese, the Lisbon Treaty, which would among other things give the European Union its first full-time president and create a new and powerful foreign policy chief, is hard to explain. Few voters fully understand it or even want to try.

"The problem is that it's not a very exciting treaty," said Gail McElroy, a lecturer in political science at Trinity College Dublin.

"Institutional efficiency is very hard to get people excited about."

The treaty, which proponents say must be enacted for the union to function more efficiently, has the support of every government in Europe as well as most of the Irish establishment, including the main political parties and unions as well as business groups and farmers' associations. But an eleventh-hour surge of opposition has proved unexpectedly persuasive.

The campaign is still too close to call. But recent opinion polls suggest that previously undecided voters - possibly a third of the electorate - are leaning against the treaty.

"The Irish seem instinctively inclined to listen to dissonant voices, to rebel against their own establishment and to scupper the best-laid plans of the Eurocrats," Fintan O'Toole, the assistant editor of The Irish Times, wrote in an editorial in The Times of London.

Come now. Europe has just spent two centuries all excited about the possibility of replacing democratic liberty with "institutional efficiency." You have to be awfully dang Bright not to grasp why offering intellectual elites another bite at that apple can't get past the unwashed masses.

Europe is long past saving, but you'd think they might have noticed by now that the successful American system is premised on designed institutional inefficiency.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at June 12, 2008 8:11 AM