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…
hammers Ben Shapiro.The RNC must be purged
It has been run by coastal elites for far too long -- and that's why Republicans, who will never win the coasts, are losing in states they should win like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The Reagan coalition still exists. But the Republicans have to embrace it. And they have to embrace candidates who embrace it, rather than shunning social conservatives and Tea Partiers.
… we have to be clear-eyed about our challengewarns David French:
To tens of millions of American voters, a conservative message of self-reliance and individual economic freedom is, quite frankly, terrifying.
… Within this liberal bubble, it is simply conventional wisdom that conservatives not only don’t care about those less fortunate but that we will even promote human suffering if it means higher profit margins and more cash in our pockets. In other words, we can change our messaging on Fox News, talk radio, and even our primaries all we want, but it won’t make a dime’s bit of difference to this decisive economic constituency. We might laugh at Obama choosing the “Pimp With a Limp” and Us Weekly over Meet the Press, but he’s simply reaching more potential voters through those outlets.
… Simply put, the larger the potential electorate, the worse we tend to do. You see this even in polls, where conservatives do worse with registered voters than likely voters and worse with adults than with registered voters.
What to do? We simply can’t retreat into our large but still-minority cocoon of new media and talk only to each other, working hard to get ever-larger numbers of our shrinking constituencies to the polls. Our cultural efforts have to be every bit as wide-ranging and persistent as those of the Left. Majority ideologies are built over generations, not overnight, and it means breaking the public-school monopoly, influencing public schools even while we work to diminish their influence, sending our best and brightest young writers and actors into the lion’s den of Hollywood, working to reform higher education and breaking the ideological hammerlock of the hard Left on faculties, and working hard — very hard — to tell the true story of conservative compassion for the “least of these,” a story featuring the efficiency and creativity of private philanthropy combined with Christ-centered love and concern for the individual.
We have the better message. Now we have to make sure our fellow citizens see it as empowering, not terrifying.
Simon Fraser, Head of the Diplomatic Service, told the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee that in its first meeting earlier this year the panel had judged France to have the most effective diplomatic service — although the UK came second.
… "There are many other good diplomatic services in the world, the French are one of them, and the important thing for us is that we can learn from them, as they can learn from us," he [said].
Dependable as they are, the world’s climate samurai can always be depended upon to make a “gutsy call” whether the skies are grey or blue, finding the most inhumane, anti-poor, and anti-human things to say in a struggling people’s moment of need.As Hurricane Sandy prepared to strike the Northeast, climate scientists from alarmist and skeptical camps alike reported the storm had little if anything to do with global warming. Martin Hoerling, who chairs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) climate variability research program, and who oversees NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators, observed, “neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades.”
However, let’s say you’re a Global Warming thumper, with nothing to gain other than tenure and title that you imagine people take seriously. Atlantic storm Sandy strikes densely populated cities in an otherwise hurricane-poor year, and what conclusion does your “scientific” mind come to?Got that? Global warming models project no appreciable change in North Atlantic storm behavior, yet global warming alarmists now say global warming caused Hurricane Sandy.
So what you’re saying is that you’re going to do the right thing, and in the midst of human loss, you’re going to urge government and civil society to redirect resources much needed to deal with the consequences of “that thing you’re so heroically worried about” to your politically fetish, even if it requires changing the apocalyptic hellfire and brimstone schtick to be revised to suit your political needs.With a backdrop containing the words, “The New Normal?” NBC News aired a video claiming, “Most scientists have no doubt of the overall cause” of Hurricane Sandy. To emphasize this false narrative, the video claims, “Even some politicians agree.” Got it? EVEN some politicians agree! In other words, if any of you anti-science deniers buy into what NOAA climate scientist Martin Hoerling reports, here’s a big slice of Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying global warming IS to blame.
Aren’t you feeling a lot more comforted knowing that, in order “to protect people” who can’t afford to move away from low-lying areas, those folks will be expected to start depending on super-costly “renewables” for their heating and electricity from now on?
It’s completely immoral, but they’re convinced of the rightness of their convictions.
Otherwise, don’t worry, kids rationalizations are on the way!It should rely on mandatory rules and use the fight against climate change as a tool for job creation. The President may thus avoid futile battles in Congress and convince rank and file citizens that fighting against climate will improve their lot.
And it will solve all ills, this thing where you pull money out of the economy and force people to depend on less productive means to achieve higher output in the next five-year-plan:Raising US fuel prices to present European levels will induce US citizens to use cars, trucks and planes a bit less lavishly, while accelerating the necessary switch to hybrid and electric engines and to public transport in the densely populated regions.
This, despite adding environmental costs. It should pay the deficit off, because we know that government is allowed to not just count revenue twice, but we all know that raising taxes always enlarges the tax base, right?
By the same token, it will help the federal government balance its chronic budget deficit and introduce overdue “green taxation” to offset environmental costs.
Remember, they’re here to help you, to lower the seas, and heal the earth. Just don’t use any heat or transportation if you’ve been washed out by a storm and you’re wet and cold.
Be sure to check out Le politiquement correct français (Espistémologie d'une crypto-religion) by Lucien-Samir Oulahbib :
Les manques, la fuite en avant vers la destruction de ce qui permet d'être ensemble - et non pas seulement de vivre ensemble - sont ici analysés en des critiques diverses (des saillies) mettant en cause par exemple la théorie dite du "genre", l'effacement de l'idée de nation, de valeur objective, bref, la mise à l'index de tout ce qui ne pense pas de façon "gauche", allant de la haine du riche à la diabolisation d'Israël?
… the political bloc that most helped push Obama to reelection was the American mediawrites Dan Gainor.
All throughout election night, pundits and reporters were talking about the economyand how that had impacted the campaign. That was seldom the story the news media told throughout the election.
According to several exit polls, Romney’s lead on the economy was small and many voters actually thought it was improving, despite years of economic cataclysm. “But Romney is winning early on a key question in the exit poll: Who can better handle the economy? He scored 49 percent to Obama's 48 percent there, though those numbers are still moving,” reported ABC.
No wonder. Networks that hammered President George W. Bush for high gas prices and high unemployment gave their candidate almost a complete pass – blaming Bush more than twice as much as Obama. On Election Day, unemployment was 7.9 percent, actually higher than it had been when Obama took office. Debt, deficit and underemployment were off the charts.
Obama didn’t win despite the numbers. He won because the media didn’t report them. They spent an entire campaign promoting social issues – abortion, gay marriage and more – where journalists near 100 percent support. The onslaught against GOP candidates was huge. The left/media strategy was merely to link Romney with any social conservative they could and hype what that candidate said.
Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell
On Election Day, the media did what they always do – blamed conservatives. CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked the question whether “the Republican Party went too far to the right.” Earlier in the evening, Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger blamed the Tea Party for Senate losses, instead of crediting them with motivating GOP grassroots voters. “Has the Tea Party really hurt the Republican chances in the last two elections to take control of the Senate?” she asked.
NBC’s Chuck Todd
In the last days before the election, journalists resorted to one of their old tricks – celebrating a “conservative” who goes off the reservation (sorry, Sen. Warren) and backs the left. In this case, the media foil was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
Liberal MSNBC
Why that mattered is that exit polls indicated 41 percent
The campaign spin wasn’t new. Journalists consistently bashed Tea Party candidates or downplayed their success like new Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. At the same time, they ignored how incredibly radical the Democratic Party had become.
Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were savaged for being out of the mainstream by the press. However, journalists yawned as Democrats continued their massive leftward shift with Fauxcahontas candidate Elizabeth Warren and the first openly gay senator, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.
It was more than that. Pick an Obama scandal and the media skipped it, covered it up or buried it beneath some bogus outrage about the right. "Fast and furious," Libya, jobs, the collapse of Arab Spring, the failed trillion-dollar stimulus, the cost of ObamaCare, the attack on religious rights and even bowing to foreign leaders – none of them got the press that made-up scandals about Romney received.
That bias culminated in a now famous debate scene with CNN’s Candy Crowley where she incorrectly fact-checked Romney and boosted Obama. Crowley’s action became the perfect metaphor for the bias of campaign 2012 – a media campaign far worse than 2008.
And the worst news of the night? Election 2016 starts today and somewhere journalists are already spinning the result.
While Obama supporter Sandra Fluke bellowed “save us, Trojan man” like so many others seeking their rent, we only have our nation’s least humble folk to blame:“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful, good society’ which shall now be Rome’s"
- Marcus Tullius Cicero who minces words even less here:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
In other news, we find fools to suffer. Young women propagandized by leftists were convinced that they would have to hoard tampons if Mitt Romney was elected.
Mitt Romney and his family would have been the essence of exactly what this country needs. But what was Romney’s recipe? Romney’s recipe was the old standby: American route to success, hard work. That gets sneered at. I’m sorry. In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America.
In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated. The Obama campaign was about small stuff. War on Women, binders, Big Bird, this kind of stuff. The Romney campaign was about big things, was about America.
(…) One of the greatest misunderstandings in this country, if you boil all this down, is what creates prosperity. The Romney campaign was essentially about that, and the Romney campaign was devoted to the traditional American view and history — vision, as well — of what creates prosperity. The old capitalism, the old arguments of hard work, stick-to-itiveness, self-reliance, charity, helping out in the community. All of these things that define the traditional institutions that made this country great, that’s what the Romney campaign was about.
It was rejected. That way, or that route to prosperity was sneered at. That route to prosperity was rejected. The people who voted for Obama don’t believe in it. They don’t think it’s possible. They think the game’s rigged. They think the deck is stacked against them. They think that the only way they’re gonna have a chance for anything is if somebody comes along and takes from somebody else and gives it to them. Santa Claus! And it’s hard to beat Santa Claus. Especially it’s hard to beat Santa Claus when the alternative is, « You be your own Santa Claus. » (…)
There is no rising to responsibility. There is no accepting responsibility. There’s just a demand that the gravy train continue, and we have an administration that’s promising an endless gravy train. All you have to do to stay on that gravy train is vote.Charles Hurt adds that
The only way this gridlock is finally broken is when politicians grow up and decide to put away Big Bird and dancing horses and seriously address like adults the $16 trillion in debts they have racked up on our credit card.
I will be debating the U.S. elections on the English channel of Radio France International early Wednesday morning between 07h00 and 09h00 GMT Paris time (click on the News button inside the Listen to RFI box on the right margin).
Obama creuse donc l’écart avec un total de 214 voix contre 148 (soit 59% pour Obama, 41% pour Romney). L’effet Sandy ? En tout cas, pour le Harry’s, c’est quasiment joué d’avance, Obama sera réélu à la Présidence des Etats-Unis.But then comes this:
« C’est vrai que depuis les deux guerres du Golfe et le 11 Septembre, moins d’Américains viennent en France », constate Alain Da Silva. « Et ceux qui viennent encore voyagent beaucoup, ils ont une ouverture d’esprit que d’autres n’ont pas, par exemple ceux qui restent chez eux et sont incapables de situer les capitales du monde. »No Pasarán's W*2 provides the translation:
The caveat if BHO loses, according to Les Inrocks: only "enlightened" Americans travel these days. The other 'Murcans are "bitter clingers" who don't get out much.To which No Pasarán's Joe replies: The Europeans are
so simplistic and monomaniacal that they think all of society changes based on who's in office: it says more about their lack of depth than anything else.
Barack Obama promised to clean up government and restore Americans' trust in their leaders. He broke this promise, and instead gave us four years of cronyism, secrecy and deception.Thus writes Tim Carney.
Obama's campaign rhetoric about honest government, his vow in 2008 to level the playing field and his pledge to right a rigged game lay at the heart of his appeal to the center. This talk of responsible government has continued throughout his tenure.
"We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now," Obama told Congress in his first State of the Union address. "We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."
A few seconds later, speaking on this very theme, the president blatantly lied to Congress and the country.
"We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs," he said.
But sitting in the front row of the House chamber were four former lobbyists whom Obama had appointed as Cabinet secretaries. His Internal Revenue Service general counsel had lobbied for the Swiss Bankers Association. His Treasury Department chief of staff was fresh off a gig as a Goldman Sachs lobbyist.
As Obama spoke those words, more than 40 ex-lobbyists held policymaking jobs in his administration.
The moment embodied Obama's greatest failures: his failure to play it straight with the American people, his failure to wrestle power from the lobbyists and his apparent failure to even try.
Obama -- through his special-interest dealings, his corporate welfare and crony capitalism, his deceptions, his lawbreaking expansion of executive power, his disregard for transparency and his broken promises -- has increased the deficit of trust that he inherited.
Obamacare, his signature initiative, was spawned in backroom deals with the very lobbyists he attacked on the campaign trail. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the largest single-industry lobby in the country, wrote large portions of the bill. The law is loaded with special favors and subsidies that benefit drugmakers at the expense of taxpayers and patients.
Obama's lawyers tried to keep this fling secret, stonewalling congressional investigators who wanted to see the White House's emails with the drug lobby.
Obama's stimulus was a pork-laden lobbyist feeding frenzy, and cronyism pervaded his green energy subsidies. A recently revealed email shows a top Energy Department political appointee warning, "Reid may be desperate. WH may want to help," referring to vulnerable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was seeking a subsidy for his home state. "Short term considerations may be more important than longer term considerations and what's a billion anyhow?"
Obama, newly public emails show, personally oversaw this politically motivated fast-track process that led to such failed investments as Solyndra. This was not good government. This was abuse of the public trust for political gain. And it is the norm under Obama.
Obama launched the United States into war in Libya with no legal authority to do so, and he tried to dodge the issue by calling it a "kinetic action."
His administration has clamped down on transparency, creating new justifications for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests. Obama scrapped his "transparency czar" position in 2010, giving those duties to partisan lawyer Bob Bauer, who was openly hostile to transparency -- "disclosure is a mostly unquestioned virtue deserving to be questioned," Bauer once wrote.
Obama has led by misleading, and he is campaigning the same way. His economic attack on Mitt Romney centers on a flagrant misrepresentation of his own auto bailout and Romney's position. "We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt," Obama said in a radio address this year. But both GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. "You did not say that you would provide government help," Obama said to Romney in a debate, but Romney had called explicitly for federal loan guarantees.
Obama's culture war campaign consists mostly of claiming Romney would take away birth control -- because Romney opposes Obama's law outlawing co-pays on birth control and forcing employers to cover every penny of it.
On honesty, transparency and fairness, you can object that Bush was as bad. But that misses the point. Obama appealed to swing voters -- who don't share his extreme views on abortion or his expansive vision of the government's role -- by promising a new, fairer way of doing business.
He didn't deliver this. He lost our trust. He doesn't deserve it back.
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, it seemed like the beginning of a new erawrites Tim Stanley in a piece called Romney offers a real alternative to Obama, Bush and the whole New Deal sexy state circus.
The election of the first black president was historic in itself, but equally important was the discrediting and near annihilation of George W Bush’s Republican Party.
Remember Katrina? Remember Abu Ghraib? Remember Sarah Palin? We were told that these were the products of a bankrupt conservative philosophy that had morally and economically bankrupted America. It was time for a new age of ambitious liberalism.
The New Era narrative was a fraud. When Bush left office, unemployment was 7.8 per cent; today it is 7.9 per cent. Debt is up, food stamps are up, income is stagnant. Bush bailed out Wall Street and so did Obama – even Obama’s much vaunted “rescue” of the auto industry was actually kick started by Bush. If Bush suffocated civil liberties with the Patriot Act, Obama blew them to Kingdom Come with that awful kill list.
In many ways, the policies and performances of Obama and Bush are rather similar. There are some differences. First, Obama accelerated big government trends that he inherited from W – debt as a percentage of GDP is way, way up. Second, Obama was Bush’s cultural opposite. Compare the 2012 GOP and Democrat conventions. While the Republicans only talked unemployment, the Democrats had a 1960s level of obsession with sexual freedom – “Make Love, Not Jobs!” In the party’s platform, the language on abortion was changed from “safe, legal and rare” to just “safe and legal.” The distinction is significant: in the 21st century Democratic Party’s opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong or even troubling about abortion. This is Obama’s true gift to the liberal tradition: moral certainly on issues of grave moral complexity.
The way to reconcile the similarities and the differences between Bush and Obama is to see both as guardians of the New Deal tradition – with varying degress of enthusiasm and very different personalities. America still lives with mythic, traumatic and nostalgic memories of the 1930s, when Franklin D Roosevelt saved capitalism from the Great Depression. The old order had seen the presidency as a moral rather than legislative force, but from the 1930s onwards the federal government became a necessary – even benign – part of economy and society. There have been conservative rebellions (Reagan’s election in 1980) but never a true counter-revolution. If Bush was Roosevelt Lite, Obama was Roosevelt Max Strength. His 2008 electoral coalition was pure New Deal: the marginalised, the organised and the educated coming together to outnumber the reactionary and the red of neck. In office, Obama did what Democrats had often promised to do but never succeeded. Real healthcare reform, millions added to the welfare rolls and finally – finally! – someone prepared to take on the Catholic Church. Eleanor Roosevelt would be proud.
The problem was that the moment when the hardcore Roosevelt fans finally got the keys to the candy store was the exact moment when it had run out of candy. The money was gone and the economy exhausted. The New Deal order didn’t cause the recession, but it did limit America’s ability to recover from it. The creation of a warfare/welfare state consensus under both Republicans and Democrats lumbered the federal government with crippling levels of debt. Using the tax code to buy off segments of the population shrivelled income, while liberalism’s language of class war made it hard to build a consensus for reform. Talk of too many food stamps was racist. A conversation about the link between poverty and family structure was, obviously, sexist. Romney was accused of elitism for challenging a tax structure that cleaves America in two.
In 2012, Obama is the candidate of the warfare/welfare establishment that has dominated American politics for eighty years. Today, the real revolutionaries are the Tea Party, who have hijacked the Republican Party and turned it into an imperfect (and often reluctant) vehicle for a return to the fundamentals of Americanism: small, constitutional, limited government. To do this, they had to reject the politics of both Obama and Bush – and Mitt has slowly caught up. There was a significant moment in the second debate when a citizen asked Romney how he would distinguish himself from George W Bush. Romney said, “President Bush and I are different people, and these are different times.” He cited differences over aid to small business, balancing the budget, energy policy and relations with China. Remarkably, Obama then jumped in to defend Bush. “George Bush didn't propose turning Medicare into a voucher," the Prez said. "George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform … George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”
No he didn’t – and that underscores the fact that Romney offers an alternative not only to Obama but also to Bush. He offers an alternative to whole New Deal, big spending, debt hiking, contraception distributing, sexy state circus. And he’s only so radically different because the Tea Party made him that way. Romney went into the primaries branded a moderate and came out branded a conservative. He's a better, more important candidate for it.
The Romney/Ryan ticket seems to have grasped that America simply cannot continue the way it is going. In a globalised world, smaller government is more competitive and more competitive is more beautiful. It is also more concomitant with the American historical tradition. When a US president compels citizens to buy a consumer product – and gets away with it thanks to the Supreme Court – you know that something is amiss in the land of the free.
If Obama loses on Tuesday, then we’ll have to reassess what his four years meant. They were not a change in the direction that America was heading in, but rather a dramatic acceleration of the trends that came before. If Obama wins, then the race to the bottom continues. If he loses, then it’s possible that the New Deal relay is finally at an end. Romney/Ryan is a genuine alternative to everything that has come before.
Recent PostsDan Hodges and Tim Stanley debate: Barack Obama and the mendacity of hope
November 6th, 2012 8:00
Barack Obama’s put-down of his rival, Mitt Romney, during the final US presidential television debate "was a piece of condescension, and it came not from a columnist but from the Commander-in-Chief" writes Charles Moore (thanks to Instapundit) in the Telegraph.One reason, over the past four years, that Mr Obama has lost his heroic status is that people now see beyond the simple, wonderful fact that a black man can be elected president. Martin Luther King famously had a dream about the time when his own children would be judged not “by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. In the case of President Obama, this time has come.
And it turns out that his character is not that of a man who has emerged from nowhere to challenge the powerful few on behalf of the wretched of the earth. It is that of a media-savvy professor of an Ivy League university – comfortable with irony, more than comfortable with the sound of his own voice, confident that he knows a great deal more than most of us. One of the striking features of the lives of such professors is their terms of employment. They have what is called “tenure”: no one can get them out.
Mr Obama went into the contest that ends on Tuesday believing that he, too, had tenure. The White House was his. The election, like those bogus selection processes for top public sector jobs when the winner has been pre-decided, was little more than a tiresome formality.
In the first debate, when Mr Romney attacked him and proposed himself as a man with interesting answers, Mr Obama looked shocked at the challenger’s effrontery. Ever since then, he has had to wake up and fight back. He has certainly performed much better. But he still speaks as if he thinks his main qualification for the job is that he has it already. In this time of immense economic difficulty, incumbency should have few rights. You have to listen very carefully to get any idea at all of what the president proposes to do with the four more years to which he feels so strongly entitled.
In Britain and, even more, in continental Europe, the people who bring their fellow citizens the news do not really see this. To them, Mr Obama’s combination of historically persecuted ethnicity and posh seminar tone is just perfect. It satisfies their mildly Left-wing consciences and fits in with their cultural assumptions. The chief of these is that the excesses of the West, especially of America, are the biggest problem in the world. Mr Obama comes as near to saying this as anyone trying to win American votes ever could. His “apology tour” to the Middle East early in his presidency remains, for the European elites, the best thing he has ever done. He is the anti-Americans’ American.
… whenever Mr Romney has made what the media call his “gaffes”, I have noticed that almost all of them contain kernels of truth. Whether he is talking about the 47 per cent (his figure) of Americans who are suppliants of the state or about the threat from Russia, he is raising real problems, very much the sort of questions that Mr Obama would rather not discuss.
The bottom line, indeed, is that almost everybody in France is convinced that Obama is good and Romney is badconcludes Michel Gurfinkiel.
According to a GlobeScan/PIPA poll conducted in 21 countries and released on October 22, 72% of the French support Obama in the November 6 election, the highest figure in a largely pro-Obama survey. … it is true that Obama is popular in most countries, and immensely popular in France.
Sympathy for Obama is rooted in the deepest layers of the French collective psyche, right and left. He is supposed to stand for a tame, less dominant, less assertive America; and France, like many other former great powers — from Russia to China, from the Hispanic realms to the Islamic Umma — is driven by resentment against Anglo-Saxon dominance at large, and American great power in particular. That was, after all, Charles de Gaulle’s core political legacy (much more than the need to tame Germany) and the not-so-secret rationale for his Faustian alliance with both communism (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese) and Islam. …
But collective psychology may not be enough by itself. Sympathy for Obama as the symbol of a declining America has to be constantly reactivated, even in France. And here we come to another point. The French are arguably the easiest Western nation to be brainwashed. Not that France is exactly a police state or one-party regime. It is just a statist state, where most media (including those which are supposed to be private or privatized) are under either the direct or indirect supervision of the state meritocracy (or “state nobility,” as the ultra-left philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used to call it), i.e., the nation’s ruling class, a Janus-like Leviathan with both a conservative-Gaullist face and a left-wing-Gaullist face.
Most journalists learn that in order to survive and succeed within such an environment, they must abide by the following unwritten cultural and political codes: political correctness, of course, at least up to a point; corporative loyalty; and, above all, quiet acquiescence to the state nobility’s dominance, agenda, and geopolitics. When, in addition, you have only state-run universities and research institutes, run by coteries, and almost no independent foundations, you are coming close to an Orwellian, all-pervasive control system.
Citizens, however, do no get the point. They think their media are in fact free and that their journalists are usually honest and courageous. Again, it has to do with age-old traditions and delusions.
… “France is an absolute monarchy limited by satirical songs.”
Lessons from the Old Regime were not lost to the really authoritarian rulers that dominated France later on, from Napoleon, the military dictator turned emperor, to the Gaullist-elected dynasty of “republican monarchs.” They understood that a measure of “song,” of apparent freedom, would make their rule palatable. Real freedom has to do with habeas corpus, property, and the Bill of Rights. Freedom, French style, is essentially sticking to 18th century novelists’ standards, from Marquis de Sade to Les Liaisons Dangereuses: the freedom not to go to church on Sunday and the freedom to cheat on one’s wife or husband. Enforce “French freedom” — church not being relevant anyore, only sex is at stake — and nobody will bother you about real freedom.
Now the French media and indeed the French political class know how to feed the naive French citizenry with unending love, romance, and hard sex stories. What really mattered in France when François Hollande, the socialist leader, was elected president last June was the ongoing fighting between his ex-companion and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, herself a presidential candidate in 2007, and his current companion, Valerie Trierweiler: a tale of jealousy, hatred, and near hysteria. That “Ladies’ War” (“Guerre des Dames”) sold better than anything narrowly political.
One of Barack Obama's fundamental goals is to transform America from one nation under God to a totally secular nation where we are permitted to recognize no higher power than the federal governmentThey also support Todd Akin in Missouri…
If Romney wins, we will have to think about the manner in which our grand-children will survive in an age of darkness.To no one's surprise, the author of Dreaming Up America and Invisible Stranger is obsessed with race. Indeed, during "the age of Reagan", we are informed,
the opposition between the two parties became one of a racial nature. In the American imagination, the Democrats are the party of colored people: Latinos, Asians, African-Americans… and liberal whites, like myself.(Hmm… Why is it that I am thinking that I should review Ann Coulter's Mugged very soon?!)
Conversely, the Republican party is a party of whites. […] In the United States, you always come back to the racial issue.
Que va-t-il se passer si Romney gagne ?La République se transformera en une ploutocratie. Le New Deal de Franklin Roosevelt sera définitivement enterré. Ce mouvement n'est pas nouveau : les ploutocrates y travaillent d'arrache-pied depuis des générations. S'ils arrivent à leurs fins, il n'y aura pas de retour en arrière, sauf s'il se produit une deuxième révolution. Mais, pour qu'il y ait une révolution, il faudrait qu'une ruine totale s'abatte sur le pays et, grâce à la mondialisation, sur le monde entier : famine, migrations forcées,
augmentation dramatique du nombre de sans-abri, effondrement des services publics. Qui peut souhaiter cela ? Personne. Donc, il n'y aura pas de seconde Révolution américaine. Si Romney gagne, nous devrons réfléchir à la manière dont nos petits-enfants vont survivre dans un âge de ténèbres.
Comment percevez-vous le paysage politique américain ?Ce qui est frappant, quand on regarde les derniers mois et même les dernières années, c'est de voir à quel point le spectre politique a glissé vers la droite. Les démocrates sont là où Reagan se trouvait il y a vingt ans. Il faut avoir mon âge pour se souvenir qu'aujourd'hui Nixon serait presque à l'extrême gauche, et qu'Eisenhower ne pourrait pas faire partie du Parti républicain. Je pense que le changement a commencé du temps de Reagan, quand l'opposition entre les deux partis est devenue d'ordre raciale. Dans l'imaginaire américain, les démocrates sont le parti des gens de couleur : Latinos, Asiatiques, Afro-Américains... et des Blancs libéraux, comme moi.A l'inverse, le Parti républicain est un parti de Blancs. Or la ploutocratie américaine, qui est très effrayante, a réussi à faire naître des alliances dans lesquelles la race l'emporte sur la classe. C'est un événement historique : vous pouvez dresser des gens contre leurs intérêts si vous brandissez la question raciale. Des Blancs pauvres voteront pour les intérêts des Blancs riches, s'ils pensent que le parti adverse est associé aux Noirs. Aux Etats-Unis, on en revient toujours à la question raciale. Mais le moment est très intéressant, dans la mesure où les Blancs américains sont en train de devenir une minorité. Environ 45 %.
