Mitt and Paul Caricatured as Usual by Le Monde

As expected from Le Monde, lots of caricature about Mitt Romney as well as about Paul Ryan…

Which Armstrong Are We Talking About Anyway?

• A virtuoso with the jazz trumpet…

• who takes off to walk on the moon…

• only to win the Tour de France seven times!

• How could we let ourselves be fooled for so long?

But Apart From That Pesky Little Detail, Europe's Health Care System Is Unquestionably a Model for America to Follow

Run-of-the-mill complaints about inadequate health services only add to the prevailing disenchantment

in Norway, reports The Economist.

When America’s 4th Estate Becomes America’s 5th Column

The voice behind the camera od an ABC News crew covering the Republican National Convention is heard saying:

They are happy to have a party while black people are drowning.

This despite the fact that not one soul had yet to drown from a hurricane Isaac that has yet to reach the continental US, and the pigmentation of that imaginary friend of theirs’, a leftist human political prop has yet to be established.

It is followed by someone else laughing. Their penetrating commentary started at the very beginning of the clip:


The fact that the Democrats’ proxies, with braying idiocy, vuvuzelas, and a readily discernible aroma otherwise reserved for those who actually labor, are unperturbed by “black people drowning” to an even greater degree goes unmentioned.

Gaffes Blown Out of Proportion and Gaffes Unreported or Under-Reported, Not Worthy of Media Interest

… the way the media focus relentlessly on gaffes and ignores substantive issues when covering one side, while ignoring gaffes and issues critical of the other side, does serious damage to the integrity of news reporting.

That is what Michael Ramirez concludes when taking off from editorial cartooning to pen a viewpoint for Investor's Business Daily: Media's One-Sided Coverage Is Clear Evidence Of Bias.

In an elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, reading off a flash card that had been prepared by the teacher, the special guest counseled the child writing potato on the blackboard, "You're close, but you left a little something off। The 'e' on the end."
The media reacted swiftly and relentlessly.

The story was on all the front pages and was carried by all the major networks.

To the mainstream media, it was the moment that Dan Quayle confirmed "what a waste it is to lose one's mind."

It didn't matter that the flash card given to the vice president was prepared by a teacher and was itself misspelled. It was carried on every news wire, every news program and in every late night TV monologue.

Quayle's mind must have been on other things. It wasn't like he repeated the mistake in all 57 states, or more precisely in Beaverton, Ore., in May 2008; or while traveling on the "Intercontinental" railroad in Cincinnati on Sept. 23, 2011; or perhaps, while he was speaking to the "President" of Canada in Chicago on Aug. 7, 2007.

He might not have known how to say it in "Austrian" while in Strasbourg, France, on April 5, 2009; or perhaps he was thinking of "Polish Death Camps" at the White House on May 30, 2012; or thinking about when he met with world leaders in that splendid "Asian" city, Honolulu, on Nov. 16, 2011.

He might have been thinking of the brave Navy "corpse" man at the prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, 2010, which may not sound so strange to someone who also said: "On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today..."

All these examples were unreported or under-reported gaffes of President Obama.

The mainstream media didn't seem to think these incidents were worthy of a media feeding frenzy, unlike those of poor Dan Quayle.

If Vice President Quayle had only been misspelling "Ohio" as "Oiho" with three college students instead of one elementary student, at an institution of higher learning like Ohio State University instead of an elementary school, the media would certainly have ignored it.

Or, perhaps, they would have been all over it, as the Washington Post was ... quick to defend President Obama, claiming the photo must have been "Photoshopped."

Unfortunately for the Post, the incident was captured by several different cameras from multiple angles. Oops. Apparently, misspellings are only important when they are done by someone with whom they philosophically disagree.

It was an unimportant issue that was wildly blown out of proportion by a biased media back in 1992 and now, completely ignored by a hypercritical and biased media in 2012.

And there's no better example of the double standards and inherent bias of the media today.

In a surprise March 6 press conference, the president again had an opportunity to repudiate the disgraceful Priorities USA ad blaming Mitt Romney for the death of Joe Soptic's wife.

He declined to do so.

It's an important story, one that reveals the character of both the Obama campaign and the president himself. And yet, the real story behind it remains virtually uncovered.

A quick refresher — an ad for Obama featured laid-off steel worker Joe Soptic, who blamed Romney for losing his job and his health insurance and, incredibly, for killing his wife after Bain Capital acquired the GST Steel plant in Kansas City, Kan., in 1993.

The story goes that because his wife was no longer covered by his health insurance, her cancer went undetected and she had no access to proper health care and subsequently died.

Accusing Mitt Of Murder

Unfortunately for Joe's story, Romney had left Bain two years before Joe lost his job. His wife had retained her own health insurance through her job. Six years later, she went into the hospital for pneumonia and they detected cancer. Tragically she died shortly after.

At that time, seven years after Romney left Bain and five years after Soptic had lost his job, Romney was governor of Massachusetts.

Initially, the White House denied any knowledge of the ad. Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "We have nothing, no involvement, with any ads that are done by Priorities USA (the super-PAC that ran the ad). We don't have any knowledge of the story of the family."

Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter continued that line, telling CNN, "I don't know the facts about when Mr. Soptic's wife got sick, or the facts about his health insurance."

These explanations were implausible because the Obama campaign had featured Joe Soptic and his story on a May 14, 2012, conference call set up by the Obama campaign.

This contemptible ad reflects the worst of politics. The fact the president does not have the character to publicly demand the ad be withdrawn and condemned reveals more about President Obama than it does about Mitt Romney.

But that's typical of an administration that routinely lies, distorts and fabricates to divert attention from its own abysmal record and that will do anything to get re-elected.

The real question is whether the Obama campaign and Priorities USA coordinated their message, which would be illegal.

The White House says no. Of course, they also claimed to have never heard of Joe's story.

But this story, like many others, can be found in the same place where the stories about William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, the real cost of the GM bailout, Sec. 407 of the Welfare Reform act, the source of national intelligence leaks and the truth about Operation Fast and Furious reside.

And that, as far as the media are concerned, is nowhere.

Massive Media Failure

As White House reporter for ABC News Jake Tapper recently commented, "The media is failing the country."

I agree.

A July 16 Rasmussen poll revealed "59% of likely U.S. voters believe Obama has received the best treatment from the media so far" and "51% expect most reporters to help Obama." Only 9% expect the media to help Romney.

The media should, at bare minimum, be expected to reveal the truth. But it won't even do that.

Still the media focus nonstop on unsubstantiated reports about Mitt Romney's tax returns — not on anything substantial.

MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin, when asked about Mitt Romney's tax returns on the Today Show, said, "The press still likes this story a lot."

He added, "The media are very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants, which is to focus on this."

The fact the media are susceptible to do what any campaign wants is disturbing enough.

But the way the media focus relentlessly on gaffes and ignores substantive issues when covering one side, while ignoring gaffes and issues critical of the other side, does serious damage to the integrity of news reporting.

In a letter to Dr. James Currie in 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

But what of a press that limits itself to only covering news that favors its own political ideology?

Where is the real news?

Since the recovery began in June 2009, real median household income has fallen 4.8%, according to a new report from Sentier Research. This report is especially damning because incomes only dropped 2.6% during the recession.

Shouldn't this be front page news?

The deficit is closing in on $16 trillion. That's $1 trillion more than our entire GDP in 2011. The U.S. is on its way to becoming Spain. The president's solution? Raise taxes on the upper 2%. But that takes in only about $45 billion. The CBO reports our deficit in 2012 is $1.1 trillion.

Where are the media truth tellers on this?

ABC's Tapper criticized the media for not covering the economy more.

"A lot of people are hurting out there," he said. "Unemployment is 8.3%. That doesn't even take into account the underemployed."

In recent polls, the most important issue to Americans continues to be the economy and jobs. What's not being reported is that there are fewer people employed today than at the end of the last recession — the longest spell without net jobs growth since at least World War II.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of the recession 59.4% of Americans had jobs. That's just 58.4% today.

As Joe Biden said in Athens, Ohio, on October 15, 2008, "The No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, 'a three-letter word': jobs. J-O-B-S."

No one is more of an expert on gaffes than Joe Biden. But don't tell that to a biased media.

The media's No. 1 job should be to cover the substantive issues of this campaign without regard to party affiliation or philosophical bias.

That it's now acceptable for many in the media to flaunt their bias should be, to use Joe Biden's words, "a big f-ing deal." Sadly, it isn't.

We Want to get, like, Totally Decarbonized, Man

Europe's resistance to shale gas could boost renewables

We are cheerfully told that blindingly expensive and unreliable “resistance” will get a big boost in Europe because Europe has rejected the idea that shale gas is any sort of option their élite green mafia will countenance.

Unless carbon capture and storage can be developed on a commercial scale, that means gas as a fuel has a limited future and should not be invested in too heavily, environmental campaigners say.

They are especially against shale gas, whose environmental credentials are questioned in Europe.

Of course it will get “a boost.” All other, cheaper, more productive, and non-impoverishing forms of energy are being held hostage by taxing any form of energy commensurate with unapproved thoughts, not to mention their energetic potential.
They also demand a public enthusiasm for it as well – akin to the vigorous marching in a May Day Parade.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say this is good news for renewables. "When shale is removed from the market, renewables gain more ground," they wrote in a report earlier this year.

Really? You don’t say?

And given that no market can function unmolested in yet another disastrous utopia building effort:

"We need natural gas as a transition fuel. However, we don't need such a huge amount of gas and certainly not cheap gas, because that would kick out not just coal, but also renewables," Greenpeace renewable energy director Sven Teske said.

It seems that quotes from Greenpeace is all it takes to turn something into ‘news’. Oddly enough, even a small amount of reporting on the subject undermines the argument, and reips the mask off of those making the case too.

Investment in renewable energy rose by 5% to a record €208 billion worldwide in 2011, but that growth depended to a large degree on government subsidies.

If subsidies are cut, the risk for Europe is that cheap coal - not gas - could dominate the market and carbon emissions carry on rising.
Most utilities in Europe cannot earn a profit from their electricity if it is generated from gas at today's prices, because gas - in contrast to cheap US gas - is too expensive, and coal and carbon emissions certificates are relatively cheap.

And yet the product is taxed to subsidize politically vain forms of energy to, you know, make it seem “profitable,” as if that alone made its’ cost to society neutral.

François Hollande Channeling Neil Armstrong

Regarding the expulsion of gypsies (or Roma) by France's new socialist-humanist©-tolerant™-generous© government, Plantu is back at it:

• François Hollande:
One small kick for man,
One giant leap for the inanity of promises!

A Though for the Day

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."

- John Philpot Curran, 1790

Humans as a Useful Political Cudgel

Whe he’s not abusing the church and the papacy, he uses it as a political beratement device against those whose politics he finds distasteful. In light of the past weeks’ and Sunday’s news of the breaking up of Roma camps in France, even removing them from buildings where they were squatting, we can look at one of Plantu’s political cartoons from August of 2010 in a different light.

So much for Socialists’ beloved droit au logement. After all, that’s only for vote-buying purposes.
All the Roma were to Socialist political supports was a useful political prop, yet one that they wouldn’t even go out of their way to be photographed with.

The problem is the false consensus propagated by the chattering classes that the ruling government elite knows best what is good for France

Guy Sorman is an oddity—some might say a walking contradiction

quips Matthew Kaminski in the Wall Street Journal.

The French economist and writer has for decades championed free markets in the birthplace of dirigisme. He is a man of the right who is guardedly upbeat about France's future under the first Socialist president in 20 years. And he's decidedly positive on the euro and the European Union.

…In maintaining that the euro didn't cause the European crisis, Mr. Sorman echoes other conservative economists. Blame instead overextended welfare states that rang up huge debts, he says, and then the Keynesian stimulus spending after the 2008 global meltdown that added to the burden. Now, hard fiscal adjustments are finally being carried out across Europe. Deregulation in these troubled countries would be nice, too, he adds.

… Doomsday scenarios also overlook differences among EU states. The Berlin Wall was replaced by a sort of sunshine curtain that separates a healthy, growing north from the basket cases of Club Med. Visit Berlin, booming Warsaw or the Estonian capital of Tallinn to escape the depressed mood of Paris. "I think you'll have a European revival coming from Poland, the Baltic States and Finland" says Mr. Sorman. "Just look at what they've achieved."

… Mr. Sorman's case for the EU boils down to something you hear often from an Italian, or a Belgian and other citizens of ill-governed EU states and almost never from, say, a Dane or an Englishman. "Only Europe can protect the French from the French," he says. "If we weren't part of Europe, imagine our electricity bill or our phone bill. We might not even have the Internet."

This cri du coeur pour l'Europe comes three months into Mr. Hollande's presidential term. The men know each other well. In the mid-1980s, during a brief spell as a journalist at the now defunct Le Matin de Paris, the Socialist party operative attacked Mr. Sorman's essays on economic liberalism. At the time Mr. Sorman was a rare French defender of Reagan.
Three years ago, on a television talk show, the future French president suggested that Mr. Sorman take his liberal economic ideas and himself out of France. "This was a kind of anti-Semitic, bourgeois attack," says Mr. Sorman, who is Jewish. He says Mr. Hollande afterward told him he went too far and apologized, "and I said, 'I don't know if you went too far, but it does express your deep conviction.'"

"For me," he adds, "Mr. Hollande is quite the conservative bourgeois type of provincial France—the people who hate money, who hate capitalism, who hate business. They think all these ideas are quite foreign to French culture and French genius." Much of the French right has also stayed faithful to what's called "a certain idea of France." From Charles de Gaulle on, presidents have glorified the small shopkeeper and kept their distance from more cosmopolitan CEOs of multinationals.

… The early signs in France aren't encouraging for the small band of free marketers. In addition to various planned tax increases, the new government has proposed to protect industry and resisted spending cuts.

Yet Mr. Hollande's promise to bring the budget deficit to 3% next year from 4.5% to meet the euro-zone fiscal rules shows that the government knows it has to keep financial markets happy. His falling poll numbers reflect growing economic anxiety that might force his hand. The economy is spiraling down so fast, says Mr. Sorman, that France will be forced "to revert to free-market solutions." This is his other optimistic scenario.

"It's very rare that a nation chooses decline," he continues. "I don't think the French will choose decline. It's a young nation with many young people who want to find work."
De Gaulle had a famous line about the impossibility of governing a country with "246 different kinds of cheese." Mr. Sorman sees it differently. "The problem," he says, "is not the number of cheeses. The problem is the false consensus propagated by the chattering classes that the ruling government elite knows best what is good for the country, that the genius of France is to be ruled from above by a clairvoyant state bureaucracy, that the free market does not belong to French history—and if you are against this you are a traitor."

Before French audiences, Mr. Sorman often invokes the names of Frédéric Bastiat, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jean-Baptiste Say to show that liberal economic ideas aren't alien to French soil. "I tend to feel lonely," he says.

François Hollande, Man of Mystery?

The French have never been passionate about François Hollande, their new president. A professional politician, never a government minister, he has been engaged in the machinations of the Socialist Party for most of his career.

Thus starts the book review by Steven Erlanger.

But a new book about the inner workings of his campaign suggests that Mr. Hollande is a man of self-mastery and doggedness, with unplumbed depths. According to Laurent Binet, the novelist who wrote the book, Mr. Hollande is “a control freak,” a kind of “war machine” with a mysterious core, who detests Mr. Sarkozy and carefully managed the rivalrous personalities of the Socialist Party.

Embedded in the campaign with the understanding that he would publish only after the election, Mr. Binet, 40, whose parents were Communists, said in an interview that he initially favored Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a candidate further to the left. Mr. Binet said he was “seduced” by Mr. Hollande but still found him a mystery, a man who is affable but keeps his real self in reserve.

“I noted this in him,” Mr. Binet wrote. “What we take too often for joviality masks a fundamental irony that he only abandons in exceptional circumstances, when the gravity of the moment demands it.”

… “Mitterrand was a mystery, and he was called the Sphinx, and you could see it in his face,” Mr. Binet said. “But with Hollande it was perhaps more clever. He looks like the guy next door, but it’s much more complicated than that.”

… What seemed to animate Mr. Hollande, besides his commitment to winning the presidency, was his distaste for the incumbent, Mr. Sarkozy.

… But one of his few regrets during the long campaign, Mr. Hollande admits, is when he called Mr. Sarkozy a “sale mec,” or a nasty piece of work, a remark in an off-the-record lunch with French journalists that was quickly leaked. Mr. Hollande also said he regretted wasting his time making a trip to London, since foreign policy has little impact on French presidential campaigns.

Chided by our Tubercular Lesson-Givers

Stuck in a never-ending monotone of being prone to both endless mockery of the non-French, and self-congratulation, the likes of the French left, cultural Marxists to a tee, have managed to bleat out a good one:

La bise, un rituel « so chic » qui déroute les Américains

or:

The kiss, a "chic" ritual that disturbs the Americans

It refers to the practice of greeting one another with a kiss on each cheek. So far as I can tell, they picked this up from Arabs of the eastern Mediterranean who somehow manage to be both homophobic and pan-sexual at the same time.

We’re “uppity” or “posh” for imitating the ”bizou-bizou” habit when we do, but bow to honor their ways at the same time. The same is never true of hundreds of millions of their fellow Europeans, such as the British, Germans, all of the Scandinavians, virtually every eastern European, Austrians, and a fair number of Spaniards, the Swiss, and the French themselves who do not instinctively greet those with a kiss whom they might only know in passing.

Non-kees-kess type, for than matter, include anyone else with an eye for hygiene, and those who would rather not be pick-pocketed by someone whose name they might know.

The sad thing is that the Rue89 writer actually takes a mention of it in the New York Times to mean that it’s a “debate”, as if their cultural practices were actually globally relevant. Strangely enoough, no-one makes a point of the near universal ambient ill-regard inhabiting their society, to the point that even the preferred term used for another form of affection is an imported one: « le hug » replacing the fact that nary a soul cares about anyone else enough to use the phrase « je t’embrace » anymore.

The Busiest Job in the Whole World

A Smithsonian article on the invention of deodorant linked by Instapundit features an ad from 60 years ago in which a the main pitch starts thusly:

I've got the busiest job in the whole world

says the (proud) woman in the ad (00:03)

— American housewife.

Something to think about when discussing leftist story points, notably from the likes of Hilary Rosen, and notably about the likes of Ann Romney…

A Hotel Ad, Wherein we Ask a Nation: Where Did the Love Go ?

The Day Le Monde Published an Article by a Holocaust Denyer

"En quatre ans, il a écrit 29 fois au Monde au sujet des chambres à gaz", recensera en 1980 l'historienne Nadine Fresco dans un article fondateur des Temps modernes, "Les redresseurs de morts".

In Le Monde, Ariane Chemin tells us the story of the time, just after Christmas 1978, that the daily of reference decided to go ahead and publish an op-ed article by the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (then unknown, but that would quickly change — thanks, precisely, to the decision of Le Monde), denying the existence of gas chambers during World War II. The reason that the decision was made was because, in the wake of the sixties and of the May 1968 riots, remembers one reporter, "our guides were an open spirit and humanism", along with freedom of speech… Ah, humanism… Ah, an open spirit… Ah, tolerance… Always those good ol' buddies, ever-present with the world's left…

"Au journal, le grand débat, c'était la liberté d'expression, se souvient aujourd'hui Bruno Frappat. Dans l'après-Mai 68, l'ouverture d'esprit et l'humanisme étaient nos guides." Et notamment, à la rédaction en chef, celui de Jean Planchais. L'homme au noeud papillon est un catholique de gauche, vibrionnant et cultivé, entré au Monde juste après la guerre, quand les titres de Résistance - il était sergent-chef et FFI (Forces françaises de l'intérieur) - valaient tous les diplômes de journalisme. Alors que le vent libertaire de Mai 68 souffle encore, gonflant les ventes jusqu'à 800 000 exemplaires, Planchais veille sur la liberté d'expression de profs d'université débarrassés de la chape de plomb gaulliste.

… Et c'est ainsi que, de guerre lasse, le 29 décembre 1978, Jean Planchais fait publier dans Le Monde, rubrique Société, la fameuse tribune de Faurisson : "Le problème des chambres à gaz ou la rumeur d'Auschwitz". C'est la version améliorée, si l'on peut dire, de la lettre jaunie envoyée en vain, un an plus tôt, rue des Italiens et à d'autres titres parisiens : "Il m'arrive de rédiger 30 à 40 moutures du même article", précise le graphomane. On y retrouve la même phrase, ou presque : l'"inexistence" des chambres à gaz est une "bonne nouvelle pour la pauvre humanité".

Son fatras pseudo-scientifique est coiffé de quelques lignes de la rédaction, aussi résignées que maladroites : "M. Robert Faurisson a, dans une certaine mesure, réussi. Nul n'ignore plus, à l'en croire, qu'il n'y a jamais eu de chambres à gaz dans les camps de concentration. (...) Aussi aberrante que puisse paraître [cette] thèse, elle a jeté quelque trouble, dans les jeunes générations notamment, peu disposées à accepter sans inventaire les idées acquises. Pour plusieurs de nos lecteurs, il était indispensable de juger sur pièces."

Etrange prophétie auto-réalisatrice. Drôle de justification d'un journal qui semble déplorer le surgissement médiatique d'un homme qu'il met lui-même, ce jour-là, sous les feux de la rampe. Publié presque par effraction, entre Noël et le Nouvel An, le jour où la mort du président algérien Boumediène occupe l'actualité, le texte ne provoque pas de polémique immédiate ni de scandale apparent.

Pour démonter les thèses du falsificateur, Le Monde ouvre ses colonnes à deux des rares spécialistes de la Shoah en France : Olga Wormser-Migot et Georges Wellers, aujourd'hui décédés. Hélas ! Face aux sophismes d'un dialecticien retors, le texte de la première semble bien dense, et la démonstration du second un peu hâtive. Et que penser de cette manière de donner la parole, le même jour et dans la même page, à l'un et aux autres ?

On peut comprendre qu'ouvrant leur journal, en cet hiver 1978, plusieurs lecteurs s'étranglent. Et notamment quelques grandes consciences, comme Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Si l'impact immédiat du texte publié est faible, l'historien devine que sa portée symbolique sera considérable. "Imagine-t-on un astrophysicien qui dialoguerait avec un "chercheur" qui affirmerait que La lune est faite de fromage de Roquefort ? ", écrira-t-il en 1987 dans Les Assassins de la mémoire (La Découverte). " Du jour où Robert Faurisson (...) a pu s'exprimer dans Le Monde, quitte à s'y voir immédiatement réfuté, la question cessait d'être marginale pour devenir centrale ", ajoutera-t-il.

Le négationnisme entre dans un nouvel âge. Comble de maladresse, le surtitre donné par le journal à cet étrange feuilleton : "Le débat sur les "chambres à gaz"". Même les guillemets semblent empruntés à la phraséologie révisionniste et ne sont pas à la bonne place.

… Dans les nombreux livres consacrés au Monde, cette bourde monumentale n'a pas laissé de traces : enfouie, refoulée. Comme si ces résistants valeureux, ces hommes de la gauche chrétienne, trop honnêtes et parfois maladroits, ne s'en remettaient pas de s'être fait piéger par ce lecteur monomaniaque.

On notera par ailleurs une coquille de date :

A Vichy, en ce mois d'août 2012, il prévient qu'il n'hésitera pas à user du droit de réponse. Le 16 décembre 1978, dans un de ses courriers publié par le quotidien, le professeur demande une nouvelle fois

De Gaulle fell back on a classic from his days in London: maximizing his nuisance value — Bribe me, or else!

In the New York Times, Die Zeit's Josef Joffe is duly impressed with Jonathan Fenby's The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved.

“The General” isn’t just the story of a 20th-century giant who captivated the public’s imagination even while he was still alive. It also traces the course of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic pre-eminence it had once enjoyed.

… Le Grand Charles looms so large because his nation kept shrinking. Humiliated by Prussia-Germany in 1871, France was barely saved by America’s intervention in World War I. Succumbing to the fatigue of the 1920s and 1930s, France was done in for good by Nazi power in 1940. The shame of collaboration followed, but rebirth after D-Day was not to be. Instead, the end of the war signaled the death of an empire, from Indochina to Algeria, and the relentless decay of the Fourth Republic while the world became English with an American accent. Enter Charles de Gaulle, a man from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, as his admirer André Malraux put it. A comrade from de Gaulle’s early army days recalled: “He stood out not so much because of his size but because of his ego, which glowed from afar.”

At 6-foot-3, naturally he could see farther than his contemporaries. As France hunkered down behind the Maginot Line after World War I, de Gaulle preached the armored offense Hitler’s panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency. When Nazi Germany rearmed, de Gaulle railed against appeasement as an “irreparable disaster.” He told his family: “We have capitulated without fighting.” It was all in vain.

This is the stuff from which tragedy is made. When Hitler subdued France in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London. “It was for me,” he wrote while Vichy France half resisted, half embraced Hitler, “to take the country’s fate upon myself.” He and who else? De Gaulle’s war years in London read like “Don Quixote Doing Achilles at the Court of St. James’s.”

Hitler was the enemy across the Channel, Churchill the enemy next door. He (and Franklin Roosevelt) barely suffered the general’s antics. “The P.M. is sick to death of him,” a minion wrote. Even the Free French headquarters, another Churchill aide noted, were “getting nearly as tired as we are of their chief’s ungovernable temper and lack of balanced judgment.” Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, politely asked him: “Do you know that, of all the European allies, you have caused us the most difficulties?” De Gaulle smiled: “I don’t doubt that. France is a great power.”

France was not. De Gaulle perfectly embodied an economy-class power that insisted on flying first class. With Germany’s defeat in sight, the general triumphantly returned to Paris (Roosevelt and Churchill let his troops march at the head of the parade), but soon both the man and the country were found wanting. De Gaulle, who probably never heard of the deadly sin of pride, would either rule or retire. After only a few days as head of the government he huffed “I’ve had enough,” and not long after he abruptly resigned.

… By 1958, on the cusp of civil war over Algeria, the Fourth Republic was ready to collapse, and it did — right into the hands of Le Grand Charles. “Great circumstances bring forth great men,” he declared. “Only during crises do nations throw up giants.”

De Gaulle reigned over the Fifth Republic for the next 11 years — a latter-day Sun King forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics. The “man from the day before yesterday” remained stuck in the 19th century, his consuming passion being the chessboard of realpolitik. Alternately, he would court and confront “les Anglo-Saxons,” the West Germans, the Soviets and the Chinese. It was power politics without war, and its name was “leverage” — either by collaring new allies (like West Germany) or betraying old ones (like Israel). As his various grands desseins faltered, de Gaulle fell back on a classic from his days in London: maximizing his nuisance value. Bribe me, or else! His “readiness to go to the brink,” Fenby writes, “created an exaggerated impression of power,” a power France did not have, never mind the atom bomb acquired in 1960. So the United States finally called his bluff. Dean Rusk, John Kennedy’s secretary of state, said: “We learned to proceed without him.”

And so did his people. Les événements of May 1968, the mightiest student revolt in the West, brought up to 10 million students and workers into the streets. In the midst of the revolution, de Gaulle’s prime minister, Georges Pompidou, declared: “The General doesn’t exist anymore; de Gaulle is dead.”

The Dooming of the Modern Mind

Intellectual Hygiene and Its Enemies
Among them Gore Vidal


Victor David Hanson, not one to speak ill of the dead, manages to say what anyone who has ever had to endure a panel discussion or television appearance with Gore Vidal has felt:

Vidal said he was nauseated by American imperialism and gloated over our decline, but his real pique was that the mannered East Coast snobbishness that he loved to shock had given way to a socially mobile, no-holds-barred popular culture that did not so much ignore his world of blue-blood repartee, but had no clue that it had ever existed. He liked being hated; he hated being irrelevant.

Upon meeting him as a young man, Hanson notes an affliction from which every presumed made-for-TV intellectual in Europe still suffers from:

Vidal certainly had an instinct for saying outrageous things with such erudite authority that we yokels found him fascinating rather than repulsive. As I remember (it has been 48 years since that evening), Vidal spoke for about 30 minutes, but then he wowed the crowd to a standing ovation in the question-and-answer period (his forte), as he advocated the legalization of drugs and prostitution and went on rants about “small town” values.

Pooping the nest come naturally to this type. More to the point, their rather sad imitators, agitators of the political left, have also contracted a rather regrettable trope from them, one which they try to conceal on the election circuit: hating happy, normal people makes them feel smart.

A Le Monde Reader Caricatures the USA While Using the Catty Term "United Stateser"? The Daily Publishes 2 of His Letters in Only 3 Days

Not only does Le Monde reader André Fromon use the derogatory term étasunien (or one of its derivatives), but he grotesquely caricatures American society as well as American history — all the while quoting French intellectuals — Beaumarchais one day and Montesquieu the next. Therefore, no surprises ; André Fromon is rewarded by a letter to the editor in the daily. But that ain't all: only two days (!!!) later, he is rewarded with the publication of a second letter to the editor!

Article paru dans l'édition du 17.08.12 :

Les méchants requins et les alpinistes...

Les surfeurs australiens ne sont pas contents qu'un des leurs soit victime d'un requin par an depuis 1791 (Le Monde du 1er août). Les Etats-Uniens communient lors du massacre annuel d'un fou de la gâchette. Les premiers veulent qu'on tire sur les squales, qui s'obstinent à gâcher leur volonté d'aller surfer aux mêmes endroits qu'eux. Les seconds ne veulent pas entendre parler d'une modification du 2e amendement (1791 aussi, décidément) sacro-saint de leur Constitution. Des alpinistes, alignés comme des chenilles processionnaires, par dizaines, voire par centaines, gravissent l'Everest. Cela génère des morts (sans parler de la poubelle qu'est devenu le Toit du monde). D'autres s'offusquent qu'on leur reproche de payer les hélicoptères et ignorent qu'ils mettent en péril des sauveteurs. Il n'est pas interdit de faire attention où on va et à ce qu'on fait ; se protéger des tireurs états-uniens nécessiterait loi et courage politique... suicidaire. Etranges humains aux moeurs extravagantes et aux désirs insensés qu'un Montesquieu contemporain pourrait décrire derechef.

André Fromon,
Strasbourg

Article paru dans l'édition du 15.08.12 :

Position paradoxale

ertains Etats des Etats-Unis bannissent le foie gras français, fruit de souffrance d'animaux. Why not ? Depuis 1791 (2e amendement de la Constitution), ils tolèrent que des fous commettent des massacres à cause des 300 millions d'armes à feu en circulation dans ce pays. Tous les pays connaissent de tels paradoxes. Il est étrange qu'on se scandalise de telles pratiques alors que : le sport de haut niveau se fournit dans la dope de plus en plus sophistiquée ; on trie minutieusement ses ordures dans quelques pays pendant que les plus gros pollueurs trichent sur le « marché carbone » et nous mènent à la catastrophe annoncée en 1972 par le Club de Rome ; certains ont regardé le Tour de France et les JO sponsorisés par les laboratoires pharmaceutiques, etc. Comme chez Beaumarchais, il faut rire de tout ça, de peur d'avoir à en pleurer. Plus sérieusement, bannissons les produits made in USA qui détruisent la santé : seaux de pop-corn, outres de Coca-Cola et hamburgers.

André Fromon,
Strasbourg

Dieppe 1942, the most deadly conflict in Canadian history: “It’s our Gallipoli”

The beaches of Normandy, for most, evoke images of D-Day, the Allied invasion that set the path to victory over Germany

writes Diantha Parker, the New York Times reporter whose father was among the few non-Canadians at Dieppe in August 1942 (see also the slideshow).

Fewer people think of Dieppe, this ancient fishing and resort city about a two-and-a-half-hour drive east of those more famous beaches. This is, in part, because the word Dieppe, if it is known at all, evokes something much darker: one of the early and most crushing defeats for Allied forces at a time before the United States had fully mobilized to join them. This is especially true for Canadians, who suffered the heaviest losses here.

… The Dieppe raid, code-named Operation Jubilee, was mounted on Aug. 19, 1942, as the Allies’ first amphibious attack on German-occupied France.

More than 6,000 men landed at daybreak at five points along the beachfront here — nearly 5,000 of them Canadian, with 1,000 British commandos and 50 United States Rangers.

But things went horribly wrong. The air, sea and land attack was intended to gain control of the beaches and soaring white limestone cliffs, eliminate German gun positions and, it is now thought, look for German intelligence. The plan depended on both the cover of darkness and the element of surprise. A delay of about 20 minutes — caused, in part, by a skirmish with a German convoy — meant that the troops landed in daylight on an alerted and well-defended coast. Of the Canadians, more than 900 were killed on the beaches, and about 1,900 were taken prisoner.

Dieppe remains the most deadly conflict in Canadian history. “It’s our Gallipoli,” said Jeff Noakes, a World War II historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Ron Beal, 91, who landed that day with the Royal Regiment of Canada at Puys, a village just west of Dieppe’s main beachfront, said, “It was a slaughter.”

… After D-Day, Dieppe was cast by many — including Winston Churchill and Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten — as providing important lessons that underpinned the Allied successes in Normandy two years later. Not all historians agree completely. David O’Keefe, a historian at Marianopolis College in Montreal, has spent the past 15 years researching the raid and the plans behind it. He maintains that D-Day and Dieppe are totally different beasts.

“If you’re going to compare them — they arrived in boats; that’s about it,” he says. His research, driven by newly unclassified British intelligence documents, has been used in a new documentary being shown in Canada and Britain called “Dieppe Uncovered,” which maintains that the raid was, in part, cover for an elite Royal Marines commando unit seeking to raid a German intelligence headquarters in the town. Mr. O’Keefe said the unit was created and led by Ian Fleming, then the assistant to the leader of Royal Navy intelligence. Of course, he later invented James Bond.

Hope'n'Change Becomes Rope'n'Chains

In 2008, t'was Hope'n'Change

In 2012, what we're getting is Rope'n'Chains…

Our thoughtful, Caring Left

The near-winner of the presidential candidacy of the American Green Party was persistent in her obsession with my rectum, better known in their alternate universe as the mangina. How very presidential of someone who finds that one-time Cuban IDG trained Weathermen consulting the president not sufficiently radical enough to earn their support of the Democratic Party.

Important Advice from the White House's Current Occupant on How to Be a Trustworthy President

"You can't just make stuff up" said #BarackObama today—this was immediately fact-checked & confirmed by Obama's 2 or 3 composite girlfriends

— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) August 21, 2012

Plantu on Syria

The Islamic Summit…
Condemns the Syrian Régime

• Oh? Already?

• Resolution:
Bashar is a real meanie!

One might be forgiven for believing that Plantu has finally got it and that the Le Monde cartoonist is almost ready to join the America's United Nations-skeptical conservative movement…

Plantu on Putin and Pussy Riot

• Pussy Riot girls: [singing]

• Putin: Hey, girls, not so loud!! We can no longer hear the Syrian melody!

When a Democrat is in the White House, and the American superpower is not involved in a given conflict, Europeans like Plantu can finally soar and give us fabulous cartoons…

Below is one of his very rare Iraq war cartoons which did not demonize the Bush-Blair coalition as a band of marauding mass murderers, taking on, for once (for one rare time), a member of the alleged peace camp… (Then again, of course, it was a politician from the far right…)

Rot for Oil

Before they Used ‘em, They Abused ‘em

A part of the bourgeoisie wants to redress social grievances in order to assure the maintenance of bourgeois society.

Included in it are economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, do-gooders for the working classes, charity organisers, animal welfare enthusiasts, temperance union workers, two-a-penny reformers of multifarious kinds.

— Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

We know more about a 3,300-year-old teen pharaoh mummy penis than we do about…

Seriously, we know more about a 3,300-year-old teen pharaoh mummy penis than we do about what lies carefully preserved in Romney's tax returns before 2010.

Ho ho, hilarious comparison, you are so funny.

Seriously, if you had sense of fairness, you could have been saying — not just now, but over the past 4-5 years — that "we know more about a 3,300-year-old teen pharaoh mummy penis than we do about what lies carefully preserved" in Barack Obama's college transcripts records.

Seriously, you could have added that "we know more about a 3,300-year-old teen pharaoh mummy penis than we do about" Obama's girlfriends and dating life as a young man (a "composite character" in Mitt Romney's past would have led to him being branded — hardly incorrectly — as a liar; but then again, Mitt is a treacherous Republican).

Unimportant asides in this election season?

Perhaps, but at least they might reveal information about a man's mental process and sentimental life.

And again, you had 4 to 5 years to pursue those leads, leads to results that might not even reflect badly on the man (au contraire, they might do nothing but give him wholly deserved praise and a(n even more) positive aura). Instead the Obamaniacs — both media types and common citizens — have shown zero interest in asking for papers to be released or for former girlfriends to be interviewed…

After all, you do not, you must not — you never — put into question anything the One says, anything the One does, anything the One said, or anything the One did…

They Shall Not Pass

The Real Rebels (spasibo à NavyOne)








And, over at Instapundit: