No problem if a few cars and trucks get burnt up. That makes it easier for us frogs to Bar Hop in Gay Parie!
Tell that to all the neglected old people who died in the summer heat a few summers ago.
Friday, November 04, 2005
LE POT III [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081835
From the September 21, 2005 LA Times:
Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.
"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond.... Derision and demonizing are out of place."
The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."
Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."
Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises -- from Iraq to global warming -- that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.
In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."
LE POT CONT'D [Jonah Goldberg]
From the September 1 roundup:
France's LIBERATION also feels this is a huge crisis for the US, and its society.
"This is a major crisis. The proof is that Bush - whom no tragedy nor international crisis seemed to be able to bother during his Texan holidays - went to Washington on the gallop," the left-leaning daily says.
"But the most striking thing, and the most revealing, is the brutal collapse of a rich and highly developed society," it comments. "The greatest power in the world knocked out by a punch from the gods," it says.
"The authorities," both state and federal, "are floundering, helpless", it goes on.
"And violence, which is never very far in a region where it is often forgotten that misery and social exclusion are endemic, is taking over in the form of pillaging.
"After the rules of the gods comes the law of the jungle," it concludes.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081833
LE POT MEET MSSR. KETTLE [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081832
From a September 8 BBC Newspaper summary of the French press:
"Katrina's devastation points the finger at Bush's system," announces LE MONDE's top headline.
Below the headline sits an large cartoon of George Bush watching wide-screen footage of black people floating dead in the water or screaming for help as an army patrol sails by on a boat, heavily armed. Bush is being briefed by his generals. Distraught and determined, he says: "But, what country is this? Is it far away? We absolutely have to do something!"
"The ravages of hurricane Katrina, which has swallowed up New Orleans...have provoked in the United States a debate on George Bush's model of government," says the French daily, noting that "for some...the page is turning on September 11, and this is perhaps the end of triumphant conservatism".
"Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state's absence, latent racism," it goes on.
"After the 2001 attacks, the blacks had felt better integrated. Problems concerning society and poverty disappeared behind anti-terrorist concerns," it concludes.
" How the times have changed. Muslims in Paris's suburbs are out shooting at police and firefighters, burning cars and buildings, and throwing rocks at commuter trains. "
I have been lectured at least one hundred times by Europeans about America's racist society and why we have riots here in the US of A.
The fact is this is not a social problem but a moral problem that won't get fixed with more welfare benefits.
Damn! I hope they throw every last one of these punks back to Tunisia. This sickens me. I love France--unlike many people, I find the French very warm, except in the big cities, which are like any big city.
You know, there never was that big French immigration wave to the US--the French looked at the British and Germans and Irish leaving their teeming shores and said, "no thanks, we're good; think we'll hang out here..." LOL.
Shame to see it ruined because they lost their healthy nationalism to being politically correct. Ship 'em out, I say
wonder how they will handle the loss of $$ from tourism.....who wants to go to paris now?
Commentary of this sort will not be appearing in any sort of the MSM. They wouldn't want everybody to know that their favorie country has failed miserably at answering the Muslim Question.
The frogs better stand up and put down this insurrection fast. If Muslims gain control of the government and their multitude of nuclear facilities, then this will become our, and the whole world's problem.
One is tempted to suggest that Prime Minister Sharon send a note cautioning Monsieur Chirac about cycles of violence.Ah, but that wouldn't be apropos -- the French aren't concerned when Jews in France are murdered, maimed, massacred, or merely hassled in France, because they are not considered French citizens by French politicians.
Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."The LA riots happened because Rodney King got a little boo-boo for resisting arrest during a stop for DUI; it was a great excuse for burning down the laundrymats, grocery stores, and their own homes. That'll teach everyone a lesson. ;')
Crap, Intifada in Europe.
History repeats-This is reminiscent of "Kristallnacht" in 1938 Germany.
Why would that be, eight days after it began?
President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."
Sorry, I can't help but laugh.
And that's why my Schadenfreude is tempered.
I love that shot.
Suppose they are rioting because of Bush and that's fanning the worldwide upsurgenece of Islamofascism, I say great let's get it on sooner is better than later. Don't let them get any stronger...