Turkey over-fulfilled the criteria to begin EU negotiations

In 10 minutes, I will address some of the most prevalent and nonsensical arguments against Turkey's EU membership by the Europeans.
1) Turkey is too poor to be an EU member: Nonsense. Most of the post-Communist Eastern European countries (Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc.) that are now members of the EU were poorer than Turkey when they started negotiations for membership. Moreover, Greece, Spain, and Portugal were wretched poor and comparable to Turkey in the year 1980, but only through massive investments and money transfers from the wealthier EU member states that they achieved their current level of economic development. And Turkey is not even expecting that kind of economic help. Finally, Romania, a country that supposedly concluded negotiations for membership and will be a member in 2007 if all goes well, has a much lower GDP/capita in real terms than Turkey. Romania's GDP per capita was 33% lower than that of Turkey according to the World Bank Atlas 2004. Furthermore, Turkish economy has been much more vibrant and habituated into free market capitalism than any of the Eastern European member states' markets, since Turkey has been a full member of EU Customs Union since 1996, 8 years before Eastern European countries became EU members. In sum, Turkey is not particularly poor to start negotiations.
2) Turkey is not part of Europe "geographically": Nonesense. EU accepted Cyprus as a member state. Cyprus is much much closer to Lebanon and Syria than to any other EU member state. Cyprus is clearly an Afro-Asian island, not part of European geography. A similar case can be made with regards to Malta. This argument is just made for the sake of having an argument against Turkish membership anyways; I don't think anyone really believes it. They say, 95% of Turkish territory and 80% of Turkish population is in Anatolia, which is considered Asia. Well, first of all, even if most of Turkey is in Anatolia, only the Turks living in European Turkey (Eastern Thrace) are more numerous (more than 10 million people) than any of hte 10 countries that became EU member states in 2004, excepting Poland. So there goes the idiotically stupid geography argument. Moreover, Asia Minor/ Anatolia that Turkey sits over today has always been considered part of the classical Europe; Constantinople was the capital of Roman Empire for a while, Ephesus, Pergamon, and Antioch were the largest cities of Europe. Enough of this stupid argument; Europe is not a geographic entity for EU purposes, and everyone knows that.