Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
La question est de celles qu'il a été longtemps malséant de poser en France, comme toutes celles qui portent sur cette époque : que s'est-il passé du côté des arts en France pendant l'Occupation ? Résistance ? Collaboration ? Retraite prudente ? On s'en tenait au plus simple, un peintre par attitude : Picasso pour la Résistance, Derain pour la collaboration, Matisse pour la retraite discrète.
is being in re-broadcast daily at 6 pm Paris time (at noon, New York City time) until October 21st on the la Locale TV station…
People may be getting Benghazi fatigue but here's something that I haven't heard anyone pick up on...or I'm missing a lot of analysis.But I would add that there is another, perhaps even more fundamental, aspect to the situation:
Here's the first part of Obama's debate answer to the question on Benghazi.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, let me, first of all, talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation.So, here we have Obama admitting that the "buck stops here." He is responsible for the safety of our diplomats and their staff because he sends them to their assignments. Why then is the media letting Hilary take the fall (a rhetorical question)? She's only second in command in foreign affairs. We have it in his own words; Obama is the boss and nobody is more concerned about their safety than he is.
And these aren’t just representatives of the United States; they’re my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm’s way [my emphasis]. I know these folks, and I know their families.
So nobody’s more concerned about their safety and security than I am.
Barack Obama rebounds in the second presidential debate, partly thanks to Mitt Romney’s "whole binders full of women" remark, but uncertainty abounds in the homestretch of a race where both candidates look to energise their own supporters and convince the shrinking sliver of undecided voters.
• Ricki STEVENSON. Founder, Black Paris Tours. Democrats Abroad;
• Stuart HAUGEN. Former President, Republicans Abroad;
• Christopher DICKEY. Paris Bureau Chief, Newsweek;
• Garance FRANKE-RUTA. Senior Politics Editor, The Atlantic (from New York).
Produced by Anelise Borges, François Picard, Mary Colombel, Shamira Muhammad.
More evidence of French people starting to fear that Barack Obama's presidency is starting to unravel comes from a special issue of Le Nouvel Observateur called Travels Through the America We Love and the America that Scares Us, the good America being the left-leaning USA "of the poor" represented by champions of the poor like Barack Obama, George Clooney, and Scarlett Johansson, and the latter being the USA of "the rich" symbolized by people like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger (an Austrian immigrant?!).
During the entire Obama era, there have been few, if any, articles on the nightmarish aspects of American society in all its incarnations (social, medical, racial, etc, etc, etc)…
"crisscrosses the United States to dispense free medical and dental care to those most in need."
No Pasarán will be blogging the second presidential debate in this space (starting at 3 in the morning Paris time)…
Le Monde publishes an op-ed by black reporter Steven Gray that it translated from English (cutting large swathes of text while switching paragraphs around in the process and perhaps taking paras from one or more columns) and which says that Barack Obama was never the champion of blacks that he claimed to be.Aucun des deux grands partis, cependant, n'essaie sérieusement d'attirer les voix des Noirs. Ils partent de l'hypothèse que les Noirs iront voter en nombre et qu'ils donneront leurs voix à Obama – notamment dans les Etats pivots du Sud comme la Caroline du Nord et la Virginie, où les Noirs représentaient en 2008 près de 20 % de l'électorat. Cette hypothèse, toutefois, néglige l'ambivalence croissante des Noirs à l'égard d'Obama. La vérité est que la participation électorale des Noirs pourrait, cette fois, être faible.
La relation d'Obama à l'Amérique noire a toujours été délicate. Fils d'un père kényan et d'une Américaine blanche, Obama a grandi à Hawaï et en Indonésie – loin de l'expérience traditionnelle des Noirs américains. Il n'a vraiment compris les problèmes raciaux particuliers de ce pays qu'à l'université, et après son mariage avec Michelle Obama, une descendante d'esclaves dont l'expérience familiale reflète l'émergence de la classe moyenne noire américaine. En tant que jeune politicien agissant dans le quartier difficile du South Side à Chicago, Obama se trouva confronté à une double réaction contradictoire : le scepticisme des Africains-Américains trouvant qu'il n'était "pas assez noir", et les craintes des Blancs pour lesquels il l'était trop.
… il a refusé d'apporter des solutions sérieuses à la crise économique qui touche particulièrement l'Amérique noire : près de 14 % des Noirs sont au chômage – soit près de deux fois le taux national – et ce chômage se manifeste même parmi ceux ayant suivi des études supérieures. Près d'un quart des Noirs ne possèdent aucun autre bien que leur voiture. La classe moyenne de l'Amérique s'effondre, mais sa fragile classe moyenne noire est tout simplement en train de disparaître. Le premier président noir ne peut ou ne veut pas répondre explicitement à ces inquiétudes bien réelles. Personne ne s'attendait à ce que le détaché et cérébral Obama se comporte en militant. Ce n'est pas son style. Mais la vérité est que l'amorce de redressement économique du pays n'a toujours pas bénéficié aux Noirs. Un moment charnière a eu lieu en octobre 2011, quand Obama a déclaré lors d'un dîner organisé à Washington par la Congressional Black Caucus Foundation qu'il fallait "cesser de se plaindre" des difficultés économiques des Africains-Américains.
is being re-broadcast daily at 6 pm Paris time (at noon, New York City time) this week on the la Locale TV station…… last night's foreign policy. Mr. Biden said this:
Q: In March of last year, President Obama explained the military action taken in Libya by saying it was in the national interest to go in and prevent further massacres from occurring there. So why doesn't the same logic apply in Syria? Vice President Biden?
Different country. It's a different country. It is five times as large geographically, it has one-fifth the population, thatThis is the sort of thing not often served up in these debates, a statement of nonsubjective checkable facts. So we checked.
is Libya, one-fifth the population, five times as large geographically.
The land area of Syria is 185,180 sqk, with a population of 22,530,746. The land area of Libya is 1,759,540 sqk (9.5x Syria, Mr. Biden off by a factor of 2), with a population of 5,613,380 (25% of Syria, Mr. Biden off by a factor of 4). Oh, you say, the man just got his facts wrong. Yes, yes he did, but he used the inverted numbers to argue administration policy. If he really understood what he was saying -- if an actual Syrian policy were based on a Libyan geography and population density model -- he would have realized that his numbers were wrong, that his argument was turned on its head. That makes it both a conceptual and a comprehension error, not simply an error of fact. How many post-debate analysts caught this? [Maddening suspense.] Not a one that we know of. Yet everyone was very impressed with Mr. Biden on substance.
