Friday, May 25, 2007

Golden Parachute to Become Golden Shower

Can you get any more Underwhelmed than this ?:

Papers seized by two investigating magistrates from General Philippe Rondot, a former head of the DGSE, France's intelligence service, show Mr Chirac opened an account in the mid-1990s at Tokyo Sowa Bank, credited with the equivalent of £30 million.
Saving his mayoral salary diligently no doubt, despite his weakness for Chateau Sempap.

Well it’s too bad that his luck is running out. His “sovereign” immunity runs out in 18 days. As for getting on the good side of a gullible public pining to turn its vanity about itself and its passive aggression into a sort of virtue, he no longer has a way to do that. Cast your mind back to when he was a lightening rod for criticism, and what it took to give him “papal infallibility”:
There is little doubt about the source of the media's obvious faith in Chirac's statesmanlike "grandeur": namely, his high-profile role in opposing the Iraq War in early 2003. In France, Chirac's anti-war stance predictably led to a spike in his popularity, as the "anti-imperialist" left suddenly found itself expressing pride in the courageous and upstanding leadership of a man who only the year before was being persistently referred to in "leftist" media as "Super-liar" [Supermenteur]: a leaden allusion to "Superman" that is as unfunny in French as it is in English.
Too bad it didn’t last. After this brief salad day, his favorability rating at home remained far below that of George Bush in the US.

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