French Claim US Campaign Is Failing

Newsday ^ | 11/4/01

[11th Earl of Mar]

PARIS (Reuters) - Nearly half the French public believes the four-week-old U.S. military action in Afghanistan is failing, a poll released Sunday showed.

The survey by pollsters Ipsos for the Journal du Dimanche weekly showed 47 percent thought the campaign was failing, with just 17 percent confident of success.

The remainder of the 969-head sample, interviewed on November 2, gave no response or said the outlook was unclear. No definition for what constituted success or failure was given.

[SwankyC]

We should definitely listen to the French cheese eating surrender monkeys. After all - who knows more about failure in war than they do.

[SwankyC]

universal language. French? You cant be serious. In what context? There are three money languages in the world - English, German and Japanese. french is not one of those.

[Goblins]

Voiding waste is a universial action and just because speaking French resembles its sounds and in the mouth of a frenchmen its odor doesn't mean the langauge itself is universal. 8^)

[Wonder Warthog]

"I've only been down to Louisiana once, but I fell in love with New Orleans. There are a couple of good Cajun restaurants here in NYC (another gret part of living here!) that I visit every now and then."

Heh--REAL Cajun food is not to be found very easily in New Orleans. Brought yourself to Ville Platte, Lafayette, or just about any small town north and west of New Orleans to find the GOOD STUFF. Not that New Orleans food isn't pretty good--just that it is more Creole than Cajun.

[nagdt]

May I ask the French answer to the WTC bombings? Bend over and take it?

[c. l. coffman]

There are 3 problems with your argument:
1. The French think Jerry Lewis is a genius.
2. The French think Sylvester Stallone is a genius.
3. French cooking is bad food in good sauce.

[tet68]

The survey by pollsters Ipsos for the Journal du Dimanche weekly showed 47 percent thought the campaign was failing, with just 17 percent confident of success.

The survey by pollsters Ipsos for the Journal du Dimanche weekly showed 97 percent thought the French won world war I and II. , with just 3 percent saying "We invented cheese,so there!".

[Libertarian_4_eva]

So one could accurately state that the US intervention in WWI made WWII inevitable.

Wrong it was our president Woodrow Wilson that warned both the french and english to not abuse germany with harsh reparations. They both ignored him and got stung in the ass by the germans a few years later. I could aruge that it was the bad decisions of the english and french governments that caused world war two.

[vladog]

Amen brother. To bad the terror seekers did not target Paris. Besides who cares what a 3rd rate power like France things anyway. I think I like the Afgan`s better than the French!!!!

[pfflier]

The French are experts in identifying failure in war. Usually it's when the Germans are 10 miles outside of Paris.

Pershing and Patton refused to have anything to do with French Military leadership. They won wars. We would be smart to follow their lead.

[nagdt]

You sound like an arrow throwing idiot. Let's base some opinion on fact. Just because the French people love Jerry Lewis does not make them stupid. Wasn't Jerry an American icon? French food IS good, even w/o sauce.

Generally speaking though, the French are quick to be critical of Americans in general. (I) Je' (prefer)prefere intelligent conversation, like solutions to problems we know are painfully obvious.

For my French Freepers: What is YOUR solution to the threats against the US & French way of life brought upon by the terrorists?

Why are Freepers always slamming the French?

[CWOJackson]

Kind of like your posts defending them? Arrogant!

[pfflier]

Ribbeting

[mad_as_he$$]

No, I just don't appreciate the French. They always whine about how we are doing things wrong after they lost their country to the Germans twice in 25 years.

And yes I have been to France many times and still do not appreciate their attitude!

Especially their pompous look down the nose attitude twoard us. Kind of like your post.

Well thats ok since Grandpa nailed every French slut he could from 44-47. Never mind that two of his brothers died to free France's a$$.

It's ok for them to kill some greenies in cold blood but the first time we shed any blood after being attacked they start whining!

Do you want to talk about NATO?

[newwahoo]

I stand corrected. I wish I could visit all the places mentioned. I'm getting hungry!

Truth is, you're making my original point on this thread better then I could. The fact that there are real differences between Cajun and Creole culture just illustrates my point. We have more culture then the French could ever imagine.

[NewAmsterdam]

Glad you had the wherewithall to notice most Dutch speak English. This is not, however, to the credit of Hollywood, neither is it confined to people under the age of 50. It is to the credit of our educational system where children start learning English from the age of ten, or so, nowadays. Children have always learned English, German and French in school; this started in the 19th Century. with the expansion of basic education more and more people learned those languages.

Moreover, the Dutch are a fairly pragmatic people. If someone doesn't speak Dutch (which is most likely given that it is such a small language) we will speak whatever is the common language. There are few hang-ups about that. As for the American accent: sure, American film and TV influence the way peole pronounce English. But of equal importance is that the American accent is in fact closer to our own tongue and thus easier to pronounce. In school, people learn to speak Englsih-English, which is, however, more difficult to pronounce properly.

[NewAmsterdam]

For someone who claims not to bother with the French at all you seem to get suspiciously worked up about them. Anyone who claims not to care about something usually cares about it a whole lot. Perhaps your hatred of the French hides some other frustrating problem?

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

Thank you for post #113. But I think your attempt to inspire reflection is a hopeless cause. I don't know where the blowhardism comes from. I wasn't raised around people like that.

I could float a few theories, but they might be just a more refined version of blowhardism.

Perhaps in the midst of this "Last Remaining Superpower On Earth" nonsense there is a terrible insecurity. Or a frightening, not-fully-formed consciousness that it is all behind us; that the things we left behind and threw aside in our drive to "defeat" the Soviets were, looking back on it, too precious. That we should have held onto them because without them there is now--to paraphrase Stein--no "there" there.

Ooops. There I go--"blowhardism" and all that.....

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

"...A culture like spitting on the American troops that rescued them from the Nazis? ..."

I'm sure anecdotes have their place in human history. But to reduce French culture to spitting upon American soldiers is a bit too myopic--don't you think?

And even if the spitting incidents were indicative of something larger I would argue that larger thing was a war weary civilian population, many of whom were killed by Allied "liberation" bombing--their properties destroyed by the liberation invasion.

There are many angles in the prism of wartime and sadly, the USA killed many French people in WWII. Wars and ancient loyalties are too complicated and messy to be reduced to a single anecdote.

It's astonishing to me, in the wake of the horror and grief of September 11th, that, so far, Americans have evinced very little heightened empathy for those who have died or lived through war's devastation...

[wildandcrazyrussian]

I am glad to get your reaction to what I thought was valid and relevant information. I can't believe (even though I've heard it my whole life) that French people are supposedly cowards because they always surrender without a shot. (Well then who killed 1,700,000 French people in WWI and 610,000 in WWII, both figures including civilians)? This kind of sneering arrogance is also behind the standard response I have gotten when mentioning 20,000,000 Russian dead in WWII: "Oh, thery were all drunk on vodak and shot each other." It makes one wonder about the future of Western civilization when the sacrifices of allies are ridiculed and denied.

In the meantime, I think of you as the Miss Manners of Free Republic because of your style of writing.