Mark Steyn has some trenchant thoughts on guns, God and American exceptionalism:

Sen. Obama’s remarks about poor dumb, bitter rural losers “clinging to” guns and God certainly testify to the instinctive snobbery of a big segment of the political class. But we shouldn’t let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly – it’s more than just another dreary “-gate”) is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It’s an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God ‘n’ guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion.

How’s that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States.

Has it made them any less “bitter,” as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No. In my book “America Alone,” just out in paperback and available in all good bookstores – you’ll find it in Borders propping up the wonky rear leg of the display table for the smash new CD “Michelle Obama And The San Francisco Macchiato Chorus Sing “I Pinned My Pink Slip To The Gun Rack Of My Pick-Up,’ ‘My Dog Done Died, My Wife Jus’ Left Me, And Michael Dukakis Is Strangely Reluctant To Run Again,’ Plus ‘I Swung By The Economic Development Zone Business Park But The Only Two Occupied Rental Units Were Both Evangelical Churches’ And Other Embittered Appalachian Favorites.”

Where was I? Oh, yes. In my book “America Alone,” I note a global survey on optimism: 61 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future, 29 percent of the French, 15 percent of Germans. Take it from a foreigner: In my experience, Americans are the least “bitter” people in the developed world. Secular, gun-free big-government Europe doesn’t seem to have done anything for people’s happiness.

Read (as usual) the whole thing.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I don’t think this is unrelated:

I am going to take a bold step in a brand new direction and offer the notion that working class Americans aren’t idiots. People who wonder where the Democratic vision of prosperity through higher taxes and stricter regulation would take us need look no further than Europe. And I will echo Michelle Obama by saying that in my adult lifetime I have never been proud of Europe’s ability to create jobs or absorb immigrants.

Nor have I. Perhaps the Obamas are, though.