French Dishonor Themselves---Again!

The Boston Herald's Jules Crittendon has a nice low-key rant on the perennial problem of French doubletalk, with a laundry list of past and recent nitwittery from the Fifth Republic---what happened to the first four republics? the girlie-hommes changed their minds!---and scaldingly dumps on the cowardly PM for wanting Saddam to remain to honor French contracts, including presumably the cross-border-sneaks of satchels of gold and cash from Saddam's half-brother in Geneva to his French friend since the early '70s Slack-on-Iraq Chirac. Or perhaps they came in diplomatic pouches, since Saddam's half-bro was Iraqi Amb to the UN in Geneva. But Whacko-Jacquo didn't want his cash-flow interrupted, so girlie-homme de Villepin [whacko-Jacquo's chosen anointed successor] stabbed Colin Powell in the back after characteristically promising France's support at the UN. Like 2003, the French have again changed their soi-disant "minds."

French treachery displayed itself most prominently in June 1940 when the French Assemblee Nationale, removed to Bordeaux as the Nazis poured through their porous military, refused Churchill's offer of joint citizenship in the struggle to come and threw in their lot with the Nazis, obviously believing they were buying into a winning cause.

All the horsefeather twaddle of mythomaniacs like De Gaulle who strove to maintain French "honor" cannot erase France's historic capitulation and their subsequent collaboration with the Nazis, a few marxist bands of 'maquis' to the contrary notwithstanding. Paris, of course, led the way in laying out the welcome mat to Hitler's occupation forces.

Actually, ever since the sixteenth century, when the French sided with the Turks against the Catholic League before Lepanto, the seventeenth century when they sided with the Protestants in the Thirty Years War, the eighteenth when they fought the rest of Europe to take over the Spanish Crown and possessions, the nineteenth when Napoleon promised liberty and delivered despotism, then the long series of defeats and near-misses as the country slid into a degringolade of second-power status. DeGaulle conned the US and UK into a seat on the Security Council, which gives this historical has-been spoiling rights for serious peacekeeping.

So they didn't follow through on their Lebanon Peacekeeping verbal committments. Girlie-homme Whacko-Jacquo doesn't exactly have a track record of dependability, does he? And to give the French people, who suffer their political elites' pretensions badly, some credit, Chirac's approval rating was about 16% before the Lebanese War. Don't expect it to go up much with this latest demonstration of turncoatedness.

FINAL APERCU--I swear!:

Given that Chirac's approval numbers are in the teens, Blair's in the twenties, and Bush in the thirties, maybe we should give mini-me Vladimir [Djugashvili Jr] Putin a little more respect, since his numbers were in the 70 percentile last time I checked!

Or maybe that kind of "democracy" isn't exactly what we soft decadent westerners want for our feminized societies?