Weekend Roundup

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I hate to admit it, but I really have a hard time reading this trash while sober or even in a timely manner for that matter. Every day should be a Saturday anyway.

In Le Figaro the long suffering Ted Stanger disabuses the reader that France 24 is seen as anything other than still-born in the US, but with a anti-US dig to keep his cred. I have to correct Stanger here: France 24 has no impression in the US because no-one has paid any attention to it.

By creating France 24, Jacques Chirac was guided by the Gaullist idea that information needs to serve the national interest. In view of that, Americans have seen the new network as dead-on-arrival. That the French want to present their view of the world is a legitimate desire. Vive France24, to but those who look to it to find an alliance of anti-Americanism and anti-globalization, they would just shrug their shoulders across the atlantic. On our side [of the pond] it's seen more as a political instrument than a news network. Don't forget that after rightly rejecting pro-war politics in 2003, Chirac was desperate to find strategic allies and turned to Germany, Russia, the third world, and even that politically fictional francophonie.

Nearly 4 years later the rejection of the Iraqi campaign exposes a foundation as fragile as the one found after rejecting the [EU] constitution under the weight of domestic politics. Paris is still as isolated as Bush, and France 24 won't change that.

Locked up in the attic of the back pages Dominique Dhombres blows the cover off of " national interest" in Le Monde as an object of indecision and guilt, but still doesn't seem sure why he's doing it, asking us to "pray for peace" in a post-Christian society. Good luck with all that. I doubt we'll be seeing many candles being lit.

On the cover and below the fold, Le Monde finally notices a devastated Mogadishu now that those probable-Neo-con-lovin' Etheopians have stepped in – at least they make mention of a decade of lawless chaos, but it took a US air-raid in the south to get it onto their radar. I guess those groovy Abyssinians have just dropped off the French list of the officially pitiable oppressed that otherwise get an Albanian a glare reserved for bums and panhandlers.

From our bulging "are you f'in kidding me?" file:

Worst of all is a cartoon as implausible as Bill Clinton's trope of blackness: " Bravitude Royale". Obviously pumping Ségolène's minor statement about China while posing as the Michelin man, the minor bout of verbal "bravitude" is meant to jump the train of the actual Tiananmin Square protestor who defiantly challenged a column of tanks. Verbal bravery is the best you'll ever get from someone who will stick her neck out, provided that it's a momentary crane to pander the "human rights" voter and is eventually rendered illegible of insignificant to the snubbed. Sounds mighty damn brave, doesn't it?

Now for a moment of light comedy: LM features union shakedown artist Bernard Thibault is shown demonstrating necktie-tie-ing skills poorer than a comic Abe Vigoda character.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)