FRANCE has adopted a posture of pained superiority in the face of the torrent of Anglo-Saxon invective flowing its way. Its dismissive tone reflects the view that President Chirac is a rock of sanity while Tony Blair has landed his country in a mess by blindly following the Americans.
“Tony Blair should only blame himself,” Le Figaro said yesterday. Commenting on “Blair’s Iraq Failure”, it added: “In his enthusiasm for the battle between good and evil, he forgot that the bridge between Europe and America cannot be one-way only.”
Mr Blair’s idea of a six-test ultimatum for Baghdad was widely derided as a hopeless ploy by a man in distress. “The British are desperately trying to find elbow-room for themselves and the Americans are refusing to give it to them,” a French diplomat said.
One of those tests — the demand for Saddam Hussein to confess on Iraqi television to hiding weapons of mass destruction — prompted mirth in the Foreign Ministry. …
Capping French glory was the news yesterday that babies in the Arab world were being named “Chirac”, in tribute to the “peace-warrior President”. In 1990, they were being called Saddam, and more recently Osama.
I feel it's better to sing about these things ourselves and perform them with the people who it happened to than to have some journalist one day say 'then in 1971, one time when they were at the mudshark hotel...' But people have problems with things of a glandular nature in connection with things of a musical nature. They say why, music is way up here, and glands are way down there and they can't get 'em together, but then they are hypocritical because they take a band that doesn't sing about such things directly and couches their language a little and does it with a little choreography and say that that's great and that's real rock and roll. I maintain that there's no difference, we're just honest enough to get up and say 'this is this and that's that and here you are and respond to it' and the response is 'why... I'm hip, but of course I am offended'.
Charles Johnson
Frank says: