Standing Up to Stalin and the Soviet Union? For the New York Times, That Is "Bad Behavior"

Those who stood up to the Western leftists supporting Stalin's Soviet Union will never find solace or forgiveness from said leftists or from their ideological descendants, it emerges in Frank Langella's Dropped Names — as well as in Ada Calhoun's New York Times book review thereof.

An otherwise "satisfyingly scandalous new memoir" with "so much happy sexuality", which chronicles how "Frank Langella has slept with, been propositioned by, or at least swapped dirty jokes with a breathtaking swath of stars over his illustrious half-century career", Ada Calhoun applauds Langella for standing up to Elia Kazan's "bad behavior" before the House Un-American Activities Committee, quoting Langella approvingly as saying that nobody should have the "rights" to do such a vile thing.

Langella is “flattered and somewhat perversely titillated” when Elia Kazan makes a pass at his girlfriend in an effort to break him down, but of Kazan’s other bad behavior, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he says, “I have always felt that talent such as his doesn’t give you rights.” Langella recalls sitting with his hands folded when Kazan received a standing ovation at the Oscars.

Before Palin, Before Bush, Before Reagan, It Was Eisenhower Being Called a Dunce by the Left

Yes, that Eisenhower. The one who won the Second World War in Europe against the Nazi war machine.

Do you remember the jokes about Sarah Palin?

And about George W Bush?

And about Ronald Reagan?

Turns out it ain't nothing new… The first sentence in the John Lewis Gaddis book review of Jean Edward Smith's Eisenhower in War and Peace says it all:

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s memoirs came out while I was in graduate school in the 1960s, and one of my professors commented — not entirely facetiously — that he’d been surprised to see print on the pages. My fellow students and I were being taught that despite Eisenhower’s victories in World War II, the presidency had been beyond his capabilities.

He would have been "been surprised to see print on the pages" of Ike's memoirs! Remember that oh-so-hilarious joke about Sarah Palin:

"Sarah Palin's bookcase caught fire, and none of the books could be saved. Both were destroyed. And one of them she hadn't even finished coloring!"

Before Palin, it was told about Dubya, before Dubya it was told about Reagan, before…

Listen, I'll grant you this about the joke: it's not unfunny, far from it, and it is a two-fer that is an improvement on the Eisenhower crack, but it is hardly that original, and it turns out that it reflects less as a fair description of the subject than on the mental process of the (holier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou) leftist telling it.

It Must be That Superior Quality-of-Life Thing Americans are Supposed to be Envious of

Le Parisien reports that 2/3 of French homes have sub-standard elecreical work, and that it causes 80 000 house fires a year, fully one third of all home fires.

In fact a casual observer would call just about any property in the entire country a pit.

Of the 27 million homes in France , 7 million are at risk and 2.3 million are considered very dangerous, said the report, and an additional 300,000 properties can be deemed hazardous each year. The main deficiencies identified were lack of grounding, the location of electrical equipment (circuit breakers, service connections ...) obsolete equipment, non-observance of safety rules in bathrooms, and the lack of a protection against overcurrent [such as fuses or circuit breakers].

The damage is valued at €1 billion per year, not counting the victims – 400 deaths and 8000 casualties annually.

Comic Report and dBD Magazine Publish Greenberg's Homage to Moebius

Quelques semaines après sa parution sur le site allemand Comic Report, l'hommage de Dan Greenberg à la mémoire de Jean Giraud/Mœbius est paru dans le numéro hors série nº 9 de la revue dBD (à la page 29), et on peut choisir la revue avec une couverture Gir ou avec une couverture Moebius…

French election gag sparks fun and fury on web

France tried but failed to stop premature leaks of first round presidential election results on Sunday, setting the web-warped world of Twitter alight with jibes, jokes and cryptic messages recalling coded World War Two radio communications.

Thus starts Brian Love's article, "French election gag sparks fun and fury on web" (merci à Carine).

… The warnings spurred derision and defiance with a profusion of dummy results and fun-poking messages on a micro-blogging network where national frontiers no longer exist.

"Netherlands-Hungary qualify for return leg," said one tweet in a play on the name of Socialist challenger Francois Hollande, top scorer in Sunday's vote, and the origin of second-placed President Nicolas Sarkozy's father.

… "According to observers returning from Syria, Russian tanks left at dawn, due to arrive in Paris at 20h (8 p.m.)," read one entry, alluding to a possible left-wing victory and closing time at polling stations.

Other aliases for Hollande included "Gouda", "The Flan", a caramel pudding that resembles one of his nicknames, and more transparently, "The Rose of Correze", combining the Socialist party logo with Hollande's rural constituency in central France.

For Sarkozy, they included "platform heels", a reference to Sarkozy's penchant for shoes that give the diminutive president a few extra centimetres in photographs, "Rolex" in a nod to his taste for flashy wristwear, and "Goulash", a Hungarian recipe.

"Daddy's girl" clearly alluded to far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who took over from her father Jean-Marie last year as head of the anti-immigration National Front.

Firebrand leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon was branded "hot red pepper" by one micro-message sender.

Sarkozy, in Second Place, Is Going to the Second Round Against Hollande

"Sarkozy, Hollande Progress as Poll Shows Le Pen Wins 20% of Vote" writes Thomson/Reuters

Sarkozy's Principal Opponent in France's Presidential Election? Victor Hugo and “Les Misérables”

Suddenly, Victor Hugo has become [President Nicolas Sarkozy's] principal opponent

writes Robert Zaretsky of the University of Houston Honors College.

Whether it is the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, or the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, citing from or identifying with this hulking literary figure — the 19th century’s greatest poet, novelist and bard of the Revolution — has become de rigueur.

… Long before his death in 1885, Hugo had become France’s four-letter word for revolutionary purity. This reputation was set in motion by Hugo’s ferocious opposition to Napoleon III, who had overthrown France’s Second Republic in 1851 and revived his uncle’s empire and dictatorship.

… [In “Les Misérables,” the riotous work that channeled Hugo’s republican and revolutionary sentiments and that marks its 150th anniversary this year,] Hugo’s concern was the lot of the laboring poor in 1862.

Indeed, this was the meaning of the word “misérables.” At first synonymous with poverty, the word “misère” morphed into “les misérables” — the riffraff and rabble, the superfluous and scum, all thrown up by a society in the throws of rapid industrialization and financial speculation. Through the trials of Valjean and Marius, Cosette and Gavroche, Hugo conveyed the fragility of lives and livelihoods in the face of vast economic and technological forces.

… A technocrat, Hollande declared just a few years back that he never bothered with novels. Similarly, Sarkozy once insisted that the French electorate was ready for a new kind of leader: one who quoted from television shows rather than “The Princess of Clèves.”

… Recently, however, this cultural landscape, flat as a crêpe, has been rented by the man Le Nouvel Observateur calls the “great troublemaker,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon. With his trademark red tie and carnation, the leader of the Left Front — an alliance of Communists and disaffected Socialists — Mélenchon has barreled into third place in the national polls.

… Mélenchon’s politics are unabashedly radical (and for many critics utterly impractical): full retirement pension at the age of 60, the nationalization of energy industries and a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. They are also fully republican: greater independence within the European Union, greater distance from Germany’s suffocating economic policies and greater freedom for the French to pursue their nation’s destiny. At the same time, he disconcertingly expresses his admiration of Fidel Castro, plays down China’s repression in Tibet, all the while insisting that while Hugo Chávez is not a political model, he is a source of inspiration.

But the other Hugo has been an even greater source of inspiration for Mélenchon. At meetings, he casts a conspiratorial smile to industrial or transportation workers and confides: “I’ve been told I’m too intellectual for you. But the people are, in fact, too cultivated for their leaders.” Donning his glasses, he then reads from “Les Misérables” about the sans-culottes of 1793: “These violent men, ragged, bellowing and wild-eyed, who with clubs and pikes poured through the ancient streets of Paris.”

What Hugo’s sans-culottes wanted was “work for all men, education for their children...liberty, equality and fraternity. In a word, they wanted progress.” While Hollande belatedly announced that “Les Misérables” is his favorite book — thus usurping his previous favorite book, “Le Petit Prince” — Mélenchon now owns the novel. With Hugo’s help, he channels in remarkable ways the anxiety of a growing number of French citizens who ask if progress is possible only by accepting the economic and monetary policies of European institutions that seem no less relentless and rigid as Inspector Javert. Or, instead, as Mélenchon insists, ask if progress is desirable only when “the people reign”?

Also check out:
• Smart Diplomacy: A French Presidential Candidate Vows to Valiantly Fight the American Empire and Bring the World Out From Under Its Domineering Shadow

In his opinion piece, meanwhile, Olivier Guez describes

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that great orator, [as rekindling] the spirit of revolutionary mythology by summoning Robespierre, Fidel Castro, Jean Jaurès, Hugo Chávez and Victor Hugo, while throwing to the wolves the bosses, the bourgeois, the journalists, Wall Street and the CAC 40 index on the Paris bourse.

However, with Sam Island's picture of an Eiffel Tower sticking its head in the sand, the French journalist writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung echoes John Vinocur and Liz Alderman as he adds:

But few things have been said about the gravity of the French economic crisis: the deficits in France’s public accounts and balance of payments; its drop in competitiveness; its decline in international commerce; its apathetic growth.

Nor have we heard much about the threat of increased unemployment and reduced purchasing power from the austerity measures that the markets expect any president to take — right after the election, of course. As for civil war in Syria, the perilous transitions in Arab countries, Al Qaeda’s progress in the Sahel, or Iran’s nuclear program, the candidates have behaved as if nothing were the matter — as if France were tacitly abandoning all influence abroad.

These omissions say a great deal about the state of a country that has rarely seemed so avid in its navel-gazing, so inward-looking. In short, France in 2012 is an old nation that increasingly cultivates the temptation to be an island unto itself.

… But all 10 candidates had one enemy in common: globalization, that perpetual movement of capital, people and merchandise that endangers the French social model cherished by 90 percent of French people even as it threatens to definitively bring them to ruin. Among all inhabitants of developed nations, it seems, none hate globalization more than the French. All their political leaders have promised to “fight against” it. But no one fights globalization alone. No one can lie down alone in the path of history with impunity, not even the nation of the artiste Jean Dujardin.

Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

In some ways the most dangerous kind of politician is a man who is good at PR and nothing else

writes Paul Johnson in his monumental History of the American People.

No, he was not talking about the current occupant of the White House (his book was written in 1999, after all — before Obama had even published his (first) autobiography), but about John F Kennedy, and I am speaking as a former Kennedy devotee and Camelot maniac. (Yes, even if the book was written before 911 and even the George W Bush presidency, it is a must-read — as you will see below.)

I was coaxed into pulling Paul Johnson's masterpiece from my shelves again, as I read Instapundit's review of the PJMedia piece on what the Wikileaks memos say about the 2008 election, getting increasingly angry as I read through the J Christian Adams original.

What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election. Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

Interestingly, Glenn Reynolds calls his link to J Christian Adams' article "Bad Call." That turns out to be entirely appropriate, in view of the fact that Bernie Marcus recently pointed out (video) that

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics.

This brings to mind uncounted parallels with the 1960 election, rarely if ever disclosed in mainstream history books, and which I only learned through Paul Johnson's History of the American People, the reading of which sometimes made my eyes pop out as previously-undisclosed facts (of the unpalatable sort) were revealed.

As I re-read part of the book this morning, it turns out that there are many more parallels than you would at first assume.

Just consider:

By all historical standards, Nixon should have been an American media hero. He was a natural candidate for laurels in the grand old tradition of self-help, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. He came from nowhere.

Think of John McCain, who should have been — and who was! — an American hero for other reasons, linked to dramatic combat, horrific jail conditions (with — very — violent wardens, of a decidedly racist bent), and the ever-present risk of death in a foreign country. (In France, while both of Obama's autobiographies became best-sellers, McCain's autobiography, with its full life (written past the age of 60) and with all the drama of its war "adventures", was not even translated.)

Yet, from start to finish, the media, especially the 'quality' press, distrusted [Nixon], consistently denigrated him, and sought to destroy him, indeed in a sense did destroy him. At every crisis in his career — except the last — he had to appeal above the heads of the media to the great mass of the ordinary American people, the 'silent majority' as he called them.

When I first read Paul Johnson's book, incidentally, I remember thinking, But of course! What has always been described as an unsavory character trait in Richard Mulhouse Nixon — his alleged paranoia — turns out perhaps not to have been so paranoid at all and to have been provoked by those who claimed to be innocent bystanders, if not the actual entirely-innocent victims of "Tricky Dick"… (If only for Paul Johnson's description of Watergate — which he likens, persuasively, to a witch hunt — you must read A History of the American People.)

By contrast, the media did everything in its power to build up and sustain the beatific myth of John F. Kennedy, throughout his life and long after his death, until it finally collapsed in ruins under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. The media protected him, suppressed what it knew to be the truth about him, and if necessary lied about him, on a scale which it had never done even for Franklin Roosevelt.

C'mon. Don't tell me that I really need to point out the parallels here with Barack Hussein Obama, the anointed One come to save America and Americans from their own demons.

And this was all the more surprising because Kennedy had most of the characteristics of an American anti-hero. … the running theme of the Kennedy family [was] how to turn money into political power … Maximum use was made of Jack's war career in all his campaigns. … Old Joe set about making Kennedy first a congressman, then a senator, then president. This train of events is worth studying because it shows the extent to which money paved the way to political power in mid-20th-century America …

Again: need I really point out the parallels with Obama, and his war-chest(s), along with his billion-dollar campaigns and his spending sprees? At this point of the book, Paul Johnson brings an interesting aside:

As Tip O'Neill put it: …

'I'd have to say that [Jack] was only nominally a Democrat. He was a Kennedy, which more than family affiliation. It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own people, its own approach and its own strategies.'

The man who got it right at the time was the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He grasped the important point that electing a Kennedy was not so much giving office to an individual as handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu, with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American ethic. Having paid his first visit after Kennedy's election as President, Macmillan was asked on his return what it was like in Kennedy's Washington.

'Oh,' said he, 'it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city.'

But let's get back to the election of 1960 (as you read the few next parts, remember all the nasty things you have heard through the years about Tricky Dick).

Nixon had deliberately decided to keep Catholicism out of the campaign, and succeeded in doing so. The day after the result, he said to his aide Pete Flanigan:

'Pete, here's one thing we can be satisfied about. The campaign has laid to rest for ever the issue of a candidate's religion in presidential politics. Bad for me, perhaps, but good for America.'

In fact, Kennedy's catholicism won him the election … In the Northern industrial states, where the margins were very close, the swing of the Catholic vote to a Catholic candidate made all the difference.

Think of McCain opining that the election of a black man was good for America — which it undoubtedly was. But regarding America's alleged nightmarish racism, note that it was precisely Barack Obama's race that won him, or that helped win him, the election — as much among minorities as among liberal whites pining to demonstrate their status as "good" whites.

Unfortunately, there is a more ominous parallel between 1960 and 2008 (although not necessarily in the states specifically mentioned), which should overshadow Nixon's (and McCain's) satisfaction with the (respective) result(s), along with pride in his (in their) countrymen. Indeed, why be satisfied with a result (and why be proud of your country) if the result was the product of cheating?

This was a crooked election, especially in Texas and Illinois, two states notorious for fraud, and both of which Kennedy won. In Texas, which gave its twenty-four college votes to Kennedy, by a margin of 46,000 votes (out of 2.3 million), one expert made the calculation that

'a minimum of 100,000 votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket simply were non-existent.'

… (in one polling station, where only 4,895 voters were registered, 6,138 votes were counted as cast)

Then again, perhaps there does turn out to be a parallel between 1960 and 2008 in regards to one of the states mentioned: …

In Illinois, Nixon carried 93 of the state's 102 counties, yet lost the state by 8,858 votes. This was entirely due to an enormous Democratic turnout in Chicago, under the control of the notorious Democratic city boss and mayor, Richard Daley. Daley gave Kennedy the Windy City by the astonishing margin of 450,000 votes, and the evidence was overwhelming that fraud was committed on a large scale in Kennedy's favor.

An interesting side-note:

The mafia played an important part in this fraud. Afterwards, its boss Giancana often boasted to Judith Campbell, the mistress he shared with the President, 'Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House.'

I don't suppose the mafia helped Obama in 2008; however — No, I wouldn't want to call into question the honesty and the civility of members of ACORN and of the Black Panthers (for fear of being labeled a racist, natch).

While reading History of the American People the first time, I remember thinking: it can't be possible that the MSM history books wouldn't mention this, so probably the fraud was tiny, and/or hard to prove, and not worth mentioning, so perhaps Paul Johnson is exaggerating, if ever so slightly. Then I came to this part:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably won overall by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that a number of senior figures, including Eisenhower, urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. … A legal challenge … would have produced a 'constitutional nightmare' and worked heavily against the national interest.

Doesn't this sound like the Wikileaks memo stating that "McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around" — Bernie Marcus's dependable, mature golf player acting responsibly to prevent the ice hockey players from going berserk?

Just as interesting is the passage preceding the story of the 1960 election, which explains the downplaying of the Republican candidate while the extolling of the Democrat's alleged virtues. As you read the following passage, think also of all the ways that Rupert Murdoch has been demonized over the years, as has his Fox News network.

We come now to an important structural change in America. America had always been, from the earliest time, a democratic society, in that men (and indeed women) paid little attention to formal rank, even where it existed. Every man felt he had the right to shake hands with every other man, even the President … But this democratic spirit was balanced by the tribute of respect to those who, for one reason or another — experience, learning, position, wealth, office, or personality — had earned the title of 'boss.' The balance struck between egalitarianism and deference was one of the most remarkable characteristics of America, and one of its great strengths.

The Sixties brought a change. In the space of a decade, the word 'boss' passed almost out of the language, certainly out of universal usage. Deference itself deferred to a new spirit of hostility to authority. It became the fashion to challenge long-established hierarchies, to revolt against them or to ignore them. Nowhere was this spirit more manifest than in the media …

The gradual but cumulatively almost complete transfer of opinion-forming power from the owners and commercial managers of TV stations to the program-makers and presenters was one of the great new facts of life, unheard of before the 1950s, axiomatic by the end of the 1960s. And it was gradually paralleled by a similar shift in the newspaper world, especially on the great dailies and magazines of the East Coast, where political power, with few exceptions, passed from proprietors and major stockholders to editors and writers. Owners like Hearst and McCormick (of the Chicago Tribune), Pulitzer and Henry Luce (of Time-Life), who had once decided the political line of their publications in considerable detail, moved out of the picture and their places were taken by the working journalists. Since the latter tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in their views, this was not just a political but a cultural change of considerable importance. Indeed it is likely that nothing did more to cut America loose from its traditional moorings.

… The change could be seen in 1960, in the way the East Coast media (the New York Times and Washington Post, Time and Newsweek), handled the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.

The final word?

There is a sense in which Kennedy, who loved to use words like 'bearing,' 'results,' and 'in,' was a professional sportsman, a political huckster, and a propagandist rather than a serious statesman

Note: After spending hours writing the above, I decided to do a search of Paul Johnson in the No Pasarán archives, discovering to my great surprise that I had actually used A History of the American People once in the past to compare the elections of the 1960 and 2008, and that in… November 2008 no less (!)
Here t'is: Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared

Update: I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit)

Update: The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied? (thanks to Instapundit)

There were real crimes and real criminals. But newly found documents suggest a denial of due process of law to the defendants, a move that did the Constitution no favors.

In France, the Socialists' François Hollande Is Using Lessons From Barack Obama's 2008 Campaign

Arthur Muller, Vincent Pons and Guillaume Liegey, young Frenchmen who met in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and M.I.T., are working hard to get out the vote, American-style, for the Socialist challenger for the French presidency, François Hollande

reports Steven Erlanger.

For the last few months, they have been working to recruit and train 70,000 volunteers to knock on almost 3.5 million doors. Having witnessed the successful campaign of President Obama, they are back in France, using American models of canvassing to get left-leaning voters who would normally abstain to instead cast ballots. Their work, said Mr. Liegey, 31, is concentrated in the banlieues, poorer suburbs heavily populated with ethnic minorities, where alienation and abstention are high.

… “When we saw what Obama had done, the very systematic way of door-to-door campaigning and the way he used the Internet to coordinate volunteers, we thought, ‘How can we do that in France?’ ” said Mr. Pons, 28.

… The two main candidates are already thinking ahead to the second round. Mr. Sarkozy is hoping to come first on Sunday, to get new momentum for the next two weeks. The traditional French understanding is that in the first round, people vote with their hearts, and in the second round, with their heads. And the second round, barring surprises, should be a classic French fight between the left and the right.

“The left longs for Mitterrand and the right longs for De Gaulle”: Extreme Parties Poised to Capture 30% of French Vote on Sunday

François Kahn has had enough of the French mainstream

reports Nicola Clark.

Raised in a conservative Parisian family, his sympathies growing up were on the right. About 10 years ago, he switched his allegiance to the Socialists, who seemed to embody values that had grown important to him, such as equality and social justice.

But on Sunday, the first round of France’s presidential elections, Mr. Kahn, a 30-year-old strategic planner and graduate of one of France’s top business schools, will be voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former teacher and Trotskyist, whose party, the Front de Gauche, groups a hodgepodge of former Communists, environmentalists and anti-globalists disheartened by a presidential race that many voters feel is out of touch with their bread-and-butter concerns about jobs, the rising cost of living and the future of their state pension and health care benefits.

“The Socialists have really become a party of the center-right,” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s almost like they are too embarrassed to be on the left.”

Such frustrations are manifesting themselves across France in stronger-than-usual support for so-called fringe candidates on both the left and the right. Together, the extreme wings of French politics are poised to capture as much as 30 percent of the vote on Sunday, according to opinion polls taken in the weeks before Sunday’s election. … That is more than either of the two front-runners, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, are expected to take among a field of 10 candidates.

… The choice amounts to either doubling down on France’s Socialist traditions and ample — some say, unaffordable — welfare state, or moving farther toward the kinds of reforms aimed at trimming the state and opening French labor markets that Mr. Sarkozy has long promised but has been largely unable to deliver.

For the moment, at least, voters are in effect saying they want neither, or at least not the polite solutions put forward so far by the politicians of France’s two main political parties.

“The French mistrust of politicians and institutions has never been so high as it is today,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for Political Research at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, also known as Sciences Po. “We are experiencing a major crisis of confidence.”

… “The left longs for Mitterrand and the right longs for De Gaulle,” said Mr. Perrineau of Sciences Po. “This all has a direct impact politically,” and is reflected in the high rates of abstention and willingness to vote for the far right and far left.

“The French are telling us something,” Mr. Perrineau said.

See also:
• A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate
• While France Goes Berserk Because of 1 Lone Member of the American Nazi Party, French Extremists Promise to Win Most Votes in Sunday's Election

While France Goes Berserk Because of 1 Lone Member of the American Nazi Party, French Extremists Promise to Win Most Votes in Sunday's Election

Because a member of the American Nazi Party has become a lobbyist in Washington, according to Le Monde, this is the image that France's newspaper of reference is showing on its home page.
The map is actually the symbol of the American Nazi Party itself, but unless you click on the link provided by Le Monde, you would imagine that it is a "factual" symbol provided by the Le Monde reporters — as newspapers are wont to do…

In the meantime, Steven Erlanger, echoing John Vinocur and Nicola Clark, notes that

The first round of France’s presidential election takes place Sunday, and voters on the extremes, the far left and the far right, will play a significant role.

Related:
• A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate
• “The left longs for Mitterrand and the right longs for De Gaulle”: Extreme Parties Poised to Capture 30% of French Vote on Sunday

Strange Expectations

Three days after a man in Paris Metro line 13 near the garden-spot of Seine-Saint-Denis brandished a Colt 45 “demanding tolerance” of the universe, he was placed in preventative detention.

The actual intolerance of the Metro passengers riding through that bleak, dumpy part of the metropolis with the cracked-up pistolero was not looked into.

If Hollande wins the French presidency, the move to impose higher taxes on the wealthy could get a boost in the U.S.

Nicolas Sarkozy … is in deep trouble and is looking, for now, as if he could be the first one-term French president since 1981

writes Steven Erlanger on the front page of the International Herald Tribune in an article the New York times calls With Vote Days Away, Outlook for Sarkozy Dims but which the IHT entitles, more upbeat-edly (for the French president), Which way will Sarkozy turn?

He appears to be running neck and neck with his main challenger, the Socialist candidate François Hollande, in the first round of voting on Sunday, when 10 candidates are competing. But all the opinion polls show Mr. Sarkozy losing to Mr. Hollande in a face-off two weeks later.

… His possible defeat carries implications that would radiate far beyond Paris. Mr. Sarkozy has had contentious but valuable relationships with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a fellow conservative, on European and euro zone issues; with the British on defense issues, including the Libyan war; and with President Obama on issues involving Iran and Israel, NATO and Russia.

A victory by even a centrist Socialist like Mr. Hollande, who has advocated higher taxes on the rich and a greater emphasis on growth over austerity, would create immediate strains with Germany and rattle financial markets that are already nervous about the size of France’s debt. Mr. Hollande has also said that he wants to pull French troops out of Afghanistan sooner than NATO has agreed to do. Still, he says that his first visit abroad would be to Berlin, no matter how chilly the reception.

Mr. Sarkozy faces an electoral dilemma that is inherently tactical. Presuming he gets through to the runoff on May 6, does he continue to run to the right, or move to the center? And will it make enough of a difference anyway in a nation that admires what he promised at the beginning of his term five years ago — a “rupture” with the past — but not what he has delivered, which is a stagnant economy and unemployment at its highest level in 12 years?

Even more troubling for Mr. Sarkozy, the polls indicate that many French simply do not like him — his negative ratings are high — and that many of them will vote in the second round for the bland Mr. Hollande or simply stay home rather than see Mr. Sarkozy back in the Élysée Palace for another five years. [The Economist agrees that "All the signs point to a win for the Socialist François Hollande, chiefly because he is the anti-Sarkozy candidate".]

… Working to [the Socialist candidate's] advantage is the fact that the public has tired of the grim business of budget cutting and is yearning for a different approach. Mr. Hollande is providing that, in the form of higher taxes on the rich, more state spending and an assault on inequality, themes that could conceivably reverberate beyond the Continent in subsequent years, particularly if they succeed.

Growing inequality has become a hot-button topic across Europe, and if Mr. Hollande were to win, the move to impose higher taxes on the wealthy could get a boost elsewhere, even in the United States, where President Obama has already promoted the so-called Buffett Rule to impose a minimum tax rate on incomes in excess of $1 million a year.

A potential victory by Mr. Hollande is already making the markets nervous about the willingness of France, and perhaps other European countries, to stick with pledges of austerity. That is true even though he promises to balance France’s budget by 2017. That, in itself, would limit his policy choices, says a prominent economist, Nicolas Baverez. But the same is true for Mr. Sarkozy, he says.

“No matter who is elected, France will have a major confrontation with the markets,” Mr. Baverez said. “There is very low growth and a huge public debt, and a refusal of the French political class to deal with the necessary cuts in public spending.” But with Mr. Hollande, he said, the test from the markets would come sooner.

See also:
• As the French prepare to vote, a fog of financial uncertainty envelops France
• A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate
• The Coming Hollandaise Golden Age
• A Good Reason to Vote for the Left in France? More Sex Partners, More Fellatio, and More Sodomy

The Coming Hollandaise Golden Age

A pre-emptive visual overview:      We will be told that the seas will lower, the land will be healed, and so forth. Immediately thereafter, statements will be made to lower everyone’s expectations. Otherwise he will be pulled to the left by a unshakably large constituency of loons with Marxist fantasies and a propensity to make chaotic everything they try to manage.

As the French prepare to vote, a fog of financial uncertainty envelops France

To the list of worries about the euro zone, add one in bold

writes Liz Alderman on the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

the fate of France as it heads into the first round of a closely contested presidential election this weekend.

After a long stretch in which President Nicolas Sarkozy grappled with the euro crisis, investors are now wrestling with the implications of a potential victory by the Socialist candidate, François Hollande. Mr. Hollande’s pledges of higher taxes on the rich, and higher government spending, are luring voters disenchanted by the austerity medicine Mr. Sarkozy has administered in hopes of protecting France from financial contagion.

Many investors, though, are questioning what a government run by Mr. Hollande would mean for France’s economic competitiveness and its ability to keep clear of the financial turmoil that has once again lifted the borrowing costs of two other big euro zone countries, Spain and Italy.

… investors are already alarmed by what they see as an erosion of competitiveness among French companies, a widening current account deficit and declining exports.

As a result, investors say France is drifting away from the “core” of strong European economies that include Germany and the Nordic countries. Instead, it is increasingly being lumped together with the weak large economies of Spain and Italy, along Europe’s troubled southern rim.

… Mr. Hollande, in contrast, is pledging to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for significant new spending intended to spur the economy. He promises to raise 29 billion euros (about $38 billion) in new revenue while lifting spending by 20 billion euros.

A main Hollande plank includes introducing a 75 percent marginal tax rate on individual income above 1 million euros and forgoing the planned increase in the value-added tax. And rather than cut the government payroll, he has pledged to expand it by hiring 60,000 civil servants and teachers. Mr. Hollande would also reverse changes to the pension system instituted under Mr. Sarkozy, by pushing the retirement age back to 60, from 62.

That platform, Mr. Lefeuvre said, is why many foreign investors are hoping for Mr. Hollande’s electoral defeat.

“If he does win, there will be a lot of concern,” Mr. Lefeuvre said.

A Good Reason to Vote for the Left in France? More Sex Partners, More Fellatio, and More Sodomy

Oh how wonderful it is to be a leftist, purrs Frédéric Joignot in Le Monde's weekly magazine M. He is speaking of Hot Vidéo magazine's IFOP poll, according to which voters on the left get more sex than voters on the right.

Leftists will have an average of 9 partners during their lifetime, while 23% of members of Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party will only have one.

You will make love 7.6 times per month if you vote for the Socialists' François Hollande, 6.7 times if you vote for Sarkozy, 5.9% if you vote for François Bayrou's center party.

92% of far-left women engage in fellatio, while only 69% of rightist women do so.

Of an average of 45% of Frenchmen who engage in sodomy, 48% are on the left, with 57% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Front de Gauche so engaged.

The poll concludes that voters on the right and in the center have a more "more stable" and a "less intense" sexual life than voters on the left. Still, they declare themselves to be satisfied. As do voters on the left…

They Prefer the Absent Conscience

I've known many Europeans who very nearly seem to masturbate to this type of political fiction – in this case it’s spun around the fantasy papalism of a “President Santorum”.

“But do you pray?” the president asked.
The director gritted his teeth.
“With all due respect, sir, that’s none of your business.”
“He is not a pharisee. He does not claim public adoration for his devotion,” the voice said.
The president nodded. Could it be that God was steering him towards an ally, a man so devout that he regarded public display, something which would advance his career in this administration, as sinful for that very reason?

It’s appeal is that it makes passiveness and incapacity on the part of the reader seem intelligent and noble – somehow.

A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate

The election in France on Sunday won’t decide its next president but will more likely offer a miserable precedent

notes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune:

a success for a “Rejection Front” that combines the bleak compatibility of the extreme left and right.

Notionally at least, with the Left Front and National Fronts scores added together, the beyond-the-mainstream candidates’ total share of the vote could beat the individual first-round scores of either President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist, François Hollande.

That doesn’t change the near certainty that Marine Le Pen at the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left’s distant shore get eliminated on April 22 while Hollande and Sarkozy advance to the final round two weeks later.

But if the Rejection Front (my designation) does as well as most polls suggest, France will have legitimized two political currents that spurn serious solutions for France’s economic grief, reject civility and common sense and variously propose regression through loony yet authoritarian economics, class warfare, class or racial prejudices, anti-Western instincts, and the politics of endless rage.

Sarkozy and Hollande are each projected to win between 26 and 29 percent of the votes cast in the first round among 10 contenders. That means that if parallel estimates hold for Le Pen (16 to 18 percent) and Mélenchon (around 15), extremism’s total beats either mainstream guy.

This isn’t a nerdy detail, but a miserable political signpost in an important and usually intelligent country struggling to retain influence in the world.

Mélenchon, who has Communist Party backing, infantilizes the French with promises of an “insurrection” that in the face of the country’s pledges of austerity would create 500,000 new places in public nurseries, 200,000 new low-rent apartments per year, total reimbursement of all individual health expenditure and tenured status for 800,000 public service workers now without permanent contracts. It is not clear how the Left Front would handle the costs (the health bill alone is estimated at €40 billion yearly), but Mélenchon has given a hint: confiscation of annual individual income above €360,000.

Mélenchon’s world-view goes hand in hand with his economics. He describes the United States as “the world’s primary problem” and wants the U.S. Sixth Fleet out of the Mediterranean. More: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a hero, the Chinese invasion of Tibet was justified, and Cuba isn’t a dictatorship.

More on Mélenchon's s worldview: A French Presidential Candidate Vows to Valiantly Fight the American Empire and Bring the World Out From Under Its Domineering Shadow.

In a French political universe where no one need tell a significant percentage of the truth, dealing in fantasy is an easy alternative. The problem with Mélenchon is that his routine is showing it works in 2012 France. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the left-wing ecologist politician, has said, “He’s succeeded in restoring national nostalgia for old-time class conflict and statist tradition.”

While Mélenchon’s role in the Rejection Front refuses reality, Marine Le Pen’s National Front summons French instincts in the direction of bigotry and spite.

Read the whole thing but be sure not to miss John Vinocur's conclusion:

Through their complaisant maneuvering, Sarkozy and Hollande have reduced the stature of responsible politics in France and with it given both halves of the Rejection Front enough momentum so that, side by side, they may enter the National Assembly in June legislative elections. Leaving this likely indelible (and repugnant) trace behind, the quality of the French presidential race and runoff round beginning Monday has no place to go but up.

Profound Superficiality: The French take “le talk show” very seriously

“Try to be polite,” [Jean-Luc] Gréau shouted. “It’s the least you can do.”

[Matthieu] Pigasse replied, “I am.”

“Then shut up!” Mr. Gréau said.

“Beautiful example,” Mr. Pigasse responded. “Thank you so much.”

“You’ll speak when I have finished!” Mr. Gréau roared.

The French take “le talk show” very seriously

writes Elaine Sciolino.

The clash of ideas has been part of France’s national identity for centuries, and the intellectual — almost anyone with an air of gravitas and the confidence to opine on any subject in three points — enjoys a special status in society and a place of prominence on television. Days before France’s presidential election, the country has gone into talk overload, with both serious debates and silly posturing.

“For you Americans the national sport is football; for us French, it’s talk,” said Philippe Labro, a columnist, novelist, essayist and screenwriter whose program “Don’t Lie to Us” is broadcast Wednesday nights on Direct 8. “We talk, we criticize, we argue. We ask you to share your story, and then we try to destroy you.”

There was a time when “le talk show” meant “Apostrophes,” a live prime-time chat between an author and the host Bernard Pivot. An appearance on his show, which ran for 15 years until 1990, could turn a literary loser into a best seller overnight.

Now more than a score of talk shows compete on national and cable networks and online, with vastly different levels of politesse and combativeness. Many put a premium on what Alain Minc, the consultant and sometime adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy, calls the hallmark of a true intellectual: “profound superficiality.”