Posted on 11/08/2004 12:41:20 AM PST by kattracks
PARISTHE French spent the days leading up to the U.S. election cat aloging the evidence of an irreparable schism between les deux Amérique: Red states vs. blue states, coastal voters vs. heartland voters, rich vs. poor. But the re-election of President Bush last Tuesday will expose more domestic fault lines in Western Europe than in the United States over the next four years.
More than three-quarters of French citizens would have voted for John Kerry, according to international polls. But say this for the French: They accepted their electoral rout quickly and stoically.
The French — from the elites of the political class to the waiters in cafés — understood immediately that they could no longer view their two-year-old split with America as a temporary quarrel with a barely legitimate president. The Le Monde newspaper called Bush's triumph "a conservative revolution." Le Figaro lamented that "this year, the Democrats' resounding defeat cannot be doubted."
[snip]
And when Bush reforms America's Social Security system during his second term, America will leave France and Germany further behind — because an aging Europe faces the same entitlement-reform challenges that America is finally confronting.
So Bush's second-term mandate for Europe is: Change economically, or admit your political irrelevance.
Europeans loathe the message. But after last Tuesday, they know they are in no position to fight the messenger.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Its one thing for a news paper to make a patronising statement about the Conservative success, its quite another for the leadership of France to change their anti-american jihad.
Until Chirac is gone France will continue to be a trouble maker.
I'll probably be pulled for this or considered a troll, but I'm actually willing to listen. If everyone wants to insult me, so be it, but it's sincere. I'm a liberal, and I know you guys don't like that.
I feel that I was lied to about this war. I feel that UBL hated Saddam (yes, I am familiar with the fact that both were mass murderers). And I think this war was a victory for UBL, because it distracted from the WOT.
Give me links to websites if you need to; just tell me why my country has not lost its mind. I'll probably still disagree, and that's OK. I just don't want to think we've gone mad. I usually go on left-wing sites, so maybe there's something I don't know.
Who lied to you? I do not understand why it is so difficult for some people to judge character. Bush does not lie for sport like his predecessor did. Nor is he totally deceptive. It is not his nature!
As Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently pointed out, the relevance of France as a partner has been reduced to that of an accordian at a duckhunt.
In fact, the sole greatest contribution France has made to America in the past century has been to drag us into virtually every major conflict we've been in, either through their own inability to wage war, or more recently by supplying us with false intelligence, causing us to go where they fear to. (I personally think we should have gone, as we did, into Iraq, but we learned a great lesson on the "value" of French Intelligence.)
While the article points out that we now have clearly taken the lead in dealing with the irresponsible social benevolence of the past sixty years, the unspoken question is "When will the French ( and for that matter the rest of western Europe) come crying for help in dealing with the civil unrest, upheaval and inevitable violence that will arise from their continued tolerance of willful minorities (specifically Islamic) bent on reforming society in their own image?"
The French today are posturing for conciliation, hoping for lucrative contracts in Iraq. This would amount to "Our blood for their oil." Undoubtedly, they will regard this a just payback, since we ruined their sweetheart deal with Saddam. Next will come their need for us to cooperate in "Joint Ventures" to help boost their flagging economy, while ours booms as a result of an overhauled tax code. Before its all over, they'll be asking for our Marines to help them keep order in their streets.
My personal opinion is that , if they need aid, we should allow them to compete in our free market to earn it. Let them sell overpriced wines to pseudo-sophisticates with more money than brains, or perhaps they could just bake a lot of bread. I hear there's a great market for that kind of stuff in Massachusetts and the Pacific Northwest.
RELAX! The country has not lost it's mind. It's just going through withdrawl from socialism, globalism and amorality.
(This capitalist, free-market, superpower, self-reliant America First stuff really works, you know!)
The war in Iraq did not distract from the WOT.John sKerry distracted the war on terror.We could go into 30+ more countries and not distract from the war.You still haven't answered the question.
OK, I'll answer the question.
I feel President Bush lied to me. He said the weapons were there, and they weren't.
Look, I think we should kill the people who knocked down the towers, and their buddies. As I understand, Saddam killed the religious fanatics. An evil man, but not one of the guys that knocked down our towers, that's all.
I'll try and do my best to address your concerns.
Bush Lied:
Why is it so hard for liberals to see the difference between an intentional lie (such as "I did not have sexual relations with that woman") and making a decision based on bad information? The CIA told Bush that they had a "slam dunk" against Saddam that proved he was developing WMD. British, Russian, and French intelligence all said the same thing. Also, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned Bush that Saddam not only had WMDs, but was an imminent threat that needed to be dealt with. Who was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee? None other than John F'n Kerry himself.
We already know that Saddam was a tyrant of the worst kind. Since the press has been too focused on bringing down Bush, they don't report the horrors that have been found in Saddam's mass graves. Women who were lined up and executed while still holding their children (yes - the children were executed too), and much worse. So far, we've found over 400,000 innocent Iraqis buried in these mass graves. Most of them were Kurdish, a group that Saddam hated, so he just killed as many of them as he could.
We already know for a fact that Saddam had "tested" chemical weapons on the Kurdish people and it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that he was still developing these weapons.
Saddam had to go, and the CIA saying it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam was developing WMDs was just the icing on the cake. Bush's only fault was believing the intelligence reports. It's disappointing that we haven't found any WMDs, but the world is MUCH better off without Saddam Hussein in power.
"I feel President Bush lied to me. He said the weapons were there, and they weren't."
If one believes something to be true, tells you, later it turns out to be false, is this "lying" to you?
It was believed and stated by many others they, too, believed there were WMD. Included Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and so forth.
Were Clinton and Gore equally "lying" to you?
It still is unknown what happened to the WMD that so many believe were there. It may well be proved the WMD were moved to, say, Syria.
If Saddam harbored terrorists, he was warned 9/20/2001 that we'd be going after those situations.
Notice Libya changed their tune. They decided it wasn't worth the risk, to get caught.
Do you understand the scope of islamic terrorism around the world? Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sudan, Israel to name a few places.
Aren't these forces dangerous enough to use pre-emption?
Do you really trust the UN to do the right thing? They didn't in the Balkans, and haven't in Sudan.
Go back to DU!
Fine, I'll go to bed, although I'm not sure that it's healthy that the two sides never talk to each other. If we didn't want the best for our country, we wouldn't vote.
And of course Clinton/Gore were lying. I suppose our side could be accused of many things, but believing the dems to be anything less than a lesser evil is not one.
Sorry, more than a lesser evil.
We, Red State, people will do the fighting for you. Or not for you. You go ahead and live your life. Sleep well, eat a big breakfast. Drive your Honda. Read Mother Jones by the fire. Feed the squirrels. Somewhere your betters, real men and women, are on patrol in Falooja, standing midnight watch far to Sea, flying with the moon and stars seven miles high, or resting in a hero's grave in a small town in America.
France was a trouble maker long before Chirac and will likely continue to be long after he is gone.
Oh, yeah, did I mention that Saddam Hussein was the ONLY leader in the world who openly praised the 9/11 attack against the U.S.
But if you really want to believe that Bush is the bad guy, then go right ahead. Poor Saddam... getting picked on by that evil Bush guy who lied to Americans about WMD.
Give me a freakin' break!
There is no historcal precedent for leaders or groups needing to like each other before they conspire with each other for a common goal. Liking or hating each other - or any emotion in between has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Hitler and Stalin paired up nicely to slice up Poland and let Hitler consolidate Europe. Check out the writings pre WWII to see how they saw eye to eye. NOT!
How about Stalin and Roosevelt. Or better yet Stalin and Churhill. Did they cooperate cause they were buddies? You wouldn't want to concede that Roosevelt was pro soviet?
How about Pol Pot and the anti Communists teaming up to fight the Vietnamese with majority funding from Red China? Don't think that team wasn't made up of folks who "hated" each other.
How about the Saudis, Pakistan and the arab (foriegn) mujahaddeen and the USA teaming up to fight the USSR in Afganistan. No love lost there between those folks. Those mujahadeen evolved into Al Qaeda.
You can go back as far as u want in history and to any part of the globe and find that alliances are formed by necessity.
Did the French Ally with the Rebel colonists in the American war because the Tallyrand or King Louis thought so highly of the Continental congress or it's Generals. No way. There target was Britain. They saw America as a weapon to bleed the British. And they tried to tie up the Americans so that an American US peace would not be effected.
Am i mistaken or were the Red Chinese not allied with the Vietnamese. Only to invade them and fight them to stop anymore dominoes from falling in SE Asia.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
This is poster seems to share the Jimmy Carter like vision that got the world in a mess 35 years ago. Carter did not think the shah was a nice enough man to be an ally and let the world know it. You can draw a line from that event to the invasinon of afganistan and the forming of the arab mujahadeen (brezinskis idea) to were we are today.
Please answer truth_seeker's question...JFK
Do you think Clinton, Gore, Kerry, et. al. were lying to you when they said virtually the same thing that Bush did or are you simply another hack partisan who can't think/reason for him/herself?
Can you not see the strategic advantage of establishing a beachhead in the war on terror at the epicenter of its roots? Did you fail to notice how Libya and other Aftican nations started to cooperate after we invaded Iraq? Do you not understand that the terrorists are after control of mideast oil our would you have preferred that we let them have it? Did you miss the part where many/most intelligence offices think Saddam moved his WMD into Syria? Did you not ever understand what the Salmon Pak complex was for?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.