Mother...is that you???? Where's my check?
Posted on 05/07/2007 3:51:14 AM PDT by Puzzleman
Is the French election a belated acknowledgment of reality or the latest attempt to dodge it?
--snip--
In my recent book, whose title escapes me, I cite one of those small anecdotes that seems almost too perfect a distillation of Continental politics. It was a news item from 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.
She was 94 when she croaked, so she'd presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: "Frenchman Lived With Dead Mother To Keep Pension."
Think of France as that flat in Marseilles, and its economy as the dead mother, and the country's many state benefits as monsieur's deceased mom's benefits. To the outside observer, the French give the impression they can live with the stench of death as long as the government benefits keep coming. If that's the case, the new president will have the shortest of honeymoons.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Having said that, one wishes Sarkozy bon chance.
Mother...is that you???? Where's my check?
Yhe new French President stated that dealing with man made climate change with be one of his top priorities.
Being skeptical of whatever happens in france is always a good bet. Nevertheless, no one can deny that in this election the candidate with the most potential to be helpful to us won. Time will tell how helpful he is, but we can immediately say we are better off with him than with the communist he beat.
True. And very well put.
Could his priority be to deal with false notion of the man made climate change?
I know, I know... I sound much more optimistic than Steyn does. But me thinks even he'd be glad to make a poor forecaster this time.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Hmmm. Maybe, to extend the analogy, France has to have its Jimmy Carter before it can have its Ronald Reagan.
I’d be happy if France had a Gorbachev — a clumsy reformer who managed to bring the whole thing crashing down so that it had to be totally rebuilt whether people wanted to or not.
That’ll work too. Something’s got to give, and I’d rather live with France than Frankistan.
Live with it? They're addicted to it! Contemporary France--in fact Western Europe--is the embodiment of the death wish.
If you think that's schadenfreude, you're dead wrong! It's an exclamation of horror--choked with tears!
Agreed... I’ll be surprised if Sarkozy can do much more than “tinker around the edges”... Yet France is in the position where only radical reform, a la Reagan, is called for.
Perhaps Sarkozy will be able to accomplish that ... But I doubt it.
I wish him, and France, luck in the next years. We would be better off if France were stronger.
marking
Steyn is funny. There will be a short honeymoon. The French say they want reform but not want reform to affect them. So nothing will change.
It'll be very similar to California and Ahnold. Nothing has changed out there, despite the cries for change in the 2003 recall election.
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