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calendar   Sunday - April 22, 2007

Frogs Choose Head Toad

Not that anybody on this side of the pond really gives a damn but the French are choosing a new President today. They are going to the polls in record numbers, according to AP, to choose a replacement for Jacques Chiraq, Yassir Arafat’s little buddy. I will be glad to see Chiraq depart the scene. Twelve years of his anti-American, pro-terrorist, EU-promoting bullshit is enough. Perhaps he and Bill Clinton can get together with Jimmy Carter and have a “Useless Has-Beens Convention”?

Polls Open In French Presidential Vote
PARIS (YAHOO) - April 22, 2007

France began choosing a new president Sunday after a frenzied campaign among a dozen contenders in a race with unpredictable results. Only four of the candidates, including conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, placing No. 2 in polls, had a real chance of making it to a final round of voting May 6.

The new president will replace Jacques Chirac, ending 12 years as head of state at the close of his second mandate. With unusually dynamic front-runners and a suspense-filled campaign, the election was bringing in voters who sat out the 2002 election or cast protest votes for the extreme left and right.

Sarkozy, blunt, reformist and pro-American, was frightening to many French. Royal presented a smiling, feminist mother-figure. Scholarly farmer’s son Francois Bayrou could pull off a surprise win, and the anti-immigrant nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen was still counting on big support, in hopes of repeating his shock 2002 second-place finish.

Turnout was likely to be high, with voter registration numbers up nationwide — especially in rundown immigrant neighborhoods wracked by rioting in 2005. The successor to Chirac must steer a nuclear power in an insecure world, revive a large and listless economy, invigorate a downbeat work force, incorporate alienated young Muslims.

- More ...

So what are the Frogs going to stick the rest of the world with for at least the next six years? Take a look at the three faces below. One of them will be the face of France for some time to come. Sarkozy is leading in the polls but Le French could easily choose Royal as their first female leader (as opposed to previous male leaders who acted like women). The dark horse candidate is Le Pen, who believes France should be for the French and all Muslims need to just go back to wherever they came from. You can probably guess who my favorite candidate is. I encourage all French persons who have any sense at all to stuff the ballot boxes with votes for Le Pen.

Nicolas Sarkozy
Conservative
Segolene Royal
Socialist
Jean-Marie Le Pen
Nationalist
imageimageimage


Naturally the New York Times is covering the election and in today’s editorial pages they are already eulogizing Jacques Chiraq as a wonderful leader who stood up to the eeeeevil Bush ....

France Looks Ahead, and It Doesn’t Look Good
EDITORIAL (NY TIMES) - April 22, 2007

Today the French will begin to vote for a new president, and soon Mr. Chirac, the 74-year-old incumbent, will pass from the scene unmourned. Over a political career spanning nearly five decades, during which he was mayor of Paris, prime minister (twice) and president for 12 years, Mr. Chirac appears to have achieved little.

As mayor from 1977 to 1995, he oversaw a steady rise in political corruption and municipal graft (albeit both at insignificant levels by American big-city standards). As president, he abandoned his promises to resolve shortcomings in France’s employment laws and social services in the face of street protests. And he has done little to redress the grievances of France’s minorities or the anxieties of young people. On both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Chirac’s political obituary is being written in distinctly unflattering terms.

But is the French situation really so dire? From every quarter one hears calls for “reform” to bring France more in line with Anglo-American practices and policies. The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed.

In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.

Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls.

On the global stage, he has been perhaps the most outspoken major world leader on global warming, warning that “humanity is dancing on a volcano.” And, of course, he initiated and led international opposition to President Bush’s war in Iraq.

Let’s not forget the hysterical Francophobia of 2003: not just the imbecilities of “freedom fries” but xenophobic outbursts from Congress, the Bush administration and the mainstream American press, where prominent commentators called for France to be thrown off the Security Council and offered to let French “weasels” hold our coats while Americans once again did their fighting for them.

It wasn’t only Americans who objected. When in 2003 Mr. Chirac told the Eastern Europeans who backed Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on Iraq that they had “missed an opportunity to shut up,” his blunt talk upset a lot of people and did little for France’s popularity.

But in all of this, he has been proved right. By standing up to Mr. Bush and instructing his representatives at the United Nations to block a rush to an unprovoked war, the French president saved both the honor of the United Nations and the credibility of the international community.

- More (requires subscription) ...

[Chiraq] “saved both the honor of the United Nations and the credibility of the international community”? I think I’m going to gag. Somebody help me, please. Before we move the United Nations to Khartoum we need to move the NY TIMES to France. Now there’s a marriage made in hell.

Keep your eyes peeled on today’s Frog election, kiddies. This is just the first of four changes in world leadership that will occur over the next eighteen months. Next, we will have to worry about what the Brits are going to stick us with as Tony Blair steps down next month. Then Vladimir Putin will be stepping down as Russian leader (maybe) and finally Bush will be departing the White House, leaving all of the Bush-bashers with nothing to do. As Bob Dylan sang a long time ago, “The times they are a-changing”.


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Posted by The Skipper   United States  on 04/22/2007 at 05:09 AM   
Filed Under: • EUro-peons •  
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