As seen from Just Above Sunset

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Topic: Iraq

Where is Baron von Steuben when you need him?
More on our new Hessians and how we manage them...

Two days ago in this item - On delusion, mercenaries, Steubenville, Ohio and DeKalb, Georgia. Two friends from France comment on privatization. - Ric and Joseph in Paris had some comments on our privatization of the war in Iraq using paid troops of companies like Blackwater Security. I commented on how these "private contract troops" do pretty much what our soldiers do and called them our current pseudo-Hessians and chatted about Baron von Steuben and de Kalb and all that.

It seems there is more to be said. "Tom Tomorrow" over at This Modern World commented -

To be fair, I'm sure a lot of these guys are just working Joes, truck drivers and so on, lured there by the prospect of quick money, just like people I knew growing up were lured to Alaska during the fishing season--you go for a few months and make enough money to live for a year.

But Iraq's not Alaska, and when these guys are carrying guns and acting for all practical purposes as soldiers, things get a little ambiguous.

Indeed they do.

You might want to read Nicholas Von Hoffman on this today in The New York Observer

See Privatization in Iraq: `Contractors' With Guns
Thousands of mercenaries have been put to work in Iraq.
Nicholas Von Hoffman, April 22, 2004 - 9:41 AM

Von Hoffman has a gripe with CNN and all the rest on how they report on this:

American news organizations are not doing the truth a favor when they call these hired guns "U.S. military contractors." They are not even being accurate: The men were not contractors to the government, but Hessians or mercenary soldiers in the employ of a corporate warlord, namely Blackwater Security Consulting. Let's call these people what they are, even though Americans have yet to feel completely comfortable with the idea of killing for money.

Well, yes. Call them that. And as for Americans feeling completely comfortable with the idea of killing for money, "The Sopranos" on HBO is vastly popular, so perhaps we are less uncomfortable than Von Hoffman thinks.

Of course the news media portrayed these guys as innocent "contractors" and talked up the mutilation of the four in Fallujah as incredibly sad - implying these were just guys over there to make things better. There wasn't much on one of them having previously admitted to being a hired assassin for the forces trying to keep apartheid going. That might have ruined they narrative? Something like that. And they are dead, and we do want to avenge them, somehow.

Yes, they were bad guys. Then things get all mixed up. How are we to think about what is happening?

Does that justify killing them? No, nothing can justify taking human life - but if you take one-third of a million dollars a year to walk around in somebody else's country with a machine gun, and you get wasted by the locals, I don't think you deserve a very big or elaborate funeral. They were there for the money, and these men - elite ex-soldiers that they were - knew the risks, and they took them. So be it.

Evidently, thousands of mercenaries have been put to work in Iraq, and this raises some troublesome questions. Is all this stuff we are fed on TV and in the newspapers about the new and democratic Iraqi Army and constabulary just lies? Why aren't Iraqis guarding "bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers"? Why aren't soldiers guarding themselves?

Well, we do see the Iraqis we have trained to provide their own security are not displaying immense enthusiasm for that task.

The Associated Press reports (Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 3:21:42 AM PST) that about one in every ten members of Iraq's security forces "actually worked against" our troops during the recent militia violence in Iraq, and an additional forty percent walked off the job because of intimidation. Who says? The commander of the 1st Armored Division - Major General Martin Dempsey. And Dempsey says we're at a critical point.

So we don't have enough troops for our guys to protect themselves that well, and the Iraqi guys we trained are flaking out on us, or even turning on us.

Maybe privatization is the only good answer.

But Von Hoffman suggests this may be a bit bothersome -

Not only does privatization not save money waging war, it creates problem after problem, only some of which are visible at this juncture. If captured, are these mercenaries prisoners of war and subject to the Geneva Convention, or can they licitly be shot as spies and saboteurs?

We know that there are thousands of mercenaries now loose in Iraq. Only some of them work for Blackwater. Apparently, there are a number of companies who hire these people, so the question arises about how much control the American authorities have over the irregulars running about the country. Dyncorp mercenaries in the former Yugoslavia were accused of rape and robbery. The point is that they are not subject to military discipline, and even if they commit no acts universally regarded as criminal, they may still do things that offend the Iraqis: They might drink alcohol, use insulting gestures, whistle at women or find a dozen ways to get into trouble doing things which are innocent enough if done in Indiana, but which are incendiary acts if done in Basra.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that Dyncorp business in the former Yugoslavia. I shouldn't have - as Dyncorp is now a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and I worked for those folks for almost a decade. No, I wasn't a mercenary. I just herded the geeks and dweebs who kept various financial and manufacturing systems from crashing too often.

But in any event, this is an odd coalition bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, whether they're ready or not, and whether they asked us to do that or not. Hey, it's GOOD for them. And it was, after all, a war of self-defense - at least originally.

An odd coalition? Yes. As I see it the largest coalition component there now is our military at 130,000, followed by Halliburton, its subsidiaries and the reset of "industry" at 26,000 or so - but I'm not sure whether to count GE and Siemens as they suspended operations in Iraq today. Then come these "contract soldiers" at 20,000 or so, and then the Brits at 15,000 more or less. Spain and Honduras and the Dominican Republic have bailed. Poland is making noises that they might bail out. Australia is with us but has dropped to under eight hundred folks - and won't send more. Ah, but Fiji and Tonga are holding firm. That's a couple dozen right there.

Maybe we do need these "contract soldiers." No one else is stepping up, and this does pay well.

Posted by Alan at 11:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Wednesday, 21 April 2004

Topic: The Culture

Is it time to eschew Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin?

I have mentioned before - and Ric added visuals too - the fellow who reviews news cars in The Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first automotive writer to ever win that. See What would Roland Barthes drive? from Volume 2, Number 8 of Just Above Sunset Magazine, Monday, February 23, 2004 - where he was introduced.

Well, Dan Neil is at it again.

Today in The Los Angeles Times he eschews Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Really. He does.

The item, once you get past the extensive registration, is this:

One is unique, two is too many
Concept cars such as the Chevy SSR are defined by individuality, a quality lost on the assembly line.
Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, April 21, 2004

Neil is reviewing the new Chevrolet SSR - which is a imitation hot rod pickup truck, with a folding metal convertible roof and "retro" styling and fat tires, a sort of cartoon car, the kind of thing boys draw in the eighth grade when they're bored. It's quite odd. It started out as a "concept car" and the Chevy people actually decided to build the thing.

But who cares? The fun is in the ironic cultural warps Neil goes through - like this:

The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin's hashish supply.

Benjamin's famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special -- if it has an authenticity, an "aura," Benjamin calls it -- what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art," says Benjamin. Reproduction "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.

Which brings us to the Chevrolet SSR. The SSR -- Super Sport Roadster, if you must know -- began life as one of those impossibly cool concept cars at the 2000 Detroit Auto Show, a pickup truck gene-spliced with a hot-rod roadster and incubated in gorgeous '50s heritage, with brand cues skimmed from the noses of Chevy trucks circa 1947-'53.

Roadster? Pickup? Retro? PoMo? No one knew quite what to call it -- and resorted to calling it everything at once -- and GM didn't have a very good idea how to build it....

Well, no point in discussing the car (truck) here. It's heavy and sluggish and crude, and quite expensive. Neil covers all that.

In doing so he does get off some good lines. In discussing the folly of mass producing cars folks loved as "concepts" at the auto shows, Neil points out one might do better not to, and the manufacturers sometimes know it:

Just about every carmaker I can think of has been burned by this phenomenon at one time or another. They display a show-stopping prototype -- for example, the Plymouth Prowler -- and the car-loving public begs the automaker to bring the car to market; but by the time the finished product rolls off the assembly line, the vehicle isn't so cool anymore. Art has become commodity. Elvis has left the building.

Nobody understands the risks better than the carmakers themselves. GM's Cadillac Sixteen was the darling of last year's autoramas -- a huge, rakish and evocative 16-cylinder saloon car, as sumptuous a slice of autocratic hauteur as ever ran over a peasant. Build it and they will come, chorused the automotive press. Yeah, sure, right, said GM.

And they didn't build it. Perhaps they anticipated the lawsuits from the families of recently flattened peasants.

But they built this SSR thing. And it's just silly. And as Neil says -

It's also too expensive. Our test model, in crime-scene-tape yellow, was priced at $44,260, a price point that limits its appeal to -- if I may be so indelicate -- rich old guys who want yet another weekend toy.

And a toy is just what it looks like, something the Revell model company might require you to glue together over a weekend. It's the sort of vehicle that will stop preschoolers in their tracks, but the older the observer -- if one can judge from the looks on their faces -- the more mixed the reactions. There is a lack of seriousness with the SSR -- a lack, Benjamin would say, of authenticity. And I felt kind of ridiculous behind the wheel.

Yes, corporations can't build hot rods.

And that circles back to the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin -

By definition, hot rods are one of a kind. And when we see them on the street we light up because we are in the presence of something special, art qua art. Also, hot rods are built from the inside out. They are old cars with their guts ripped out so they can get as much performance as possible under the hood. Pouring a racy enamel over a truck chassis just isn't the same.

The concept-car SSR was as close to the real thing as it will ever get. When I look at an SSR on the street now I see only a copy of an original. It's as if it were forever and futilely swimming upstream toward its spawning grounds, the auto show floor, to the time and place where it was unique.

The SSR's greatest failing is not that it's a novelty but that it's not novel enough.

Yep, it's not the real thing. It will not do, as it is not the thing in and of itself. It may have been designed out here at the GM design center in Pomona, just east of Los Angeles, but it's not the real deal, just a corporate marketing object, a brick on wheels.

Here's a real California hot rod, on Sunset Boulevard, at the appropriate business.

Posted by Alan at 17:56 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

The Evil Twin

I did not realize that Harriet-the-Surly-Housecat had an evil twin. I poked my head out the window early this morning to see if I could get a sense of how soon the marine-layer fog might lift, and starting at me, from a deck chair at the edge of the pool next door, was this.

A cat not to be trifled with....

Posted by Alan at 11:36 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Tuesday, 20 April 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Playing dumb - C'est affreux of course - but necessary.

The necessary caveat: Language is something I've been curious about since the sixties.

And one thing that interests me is each specific language and how it shapes thought. As I've mentioned, my graduate work was on Swift, or more specifically on his ironic language. How can you say one thing and your readers know you actually mean something else entirely, but not exactly the opposite? There are seven or ten levels of other things you mean but you're not saying. They're clear anyway. Most everyone gets them just fine. They laugh.

But how did that happen? This calls for careful examination of the workings of language itself. So in high school I was reading the "New Critics" - Brooks and Warren - and then later it was off into the madness of semiotics and the deconstructionists - Derrida and that crew. And don't get me started on Chomsky - or even Benjamin Lee Whorf and the harmless Otto Jesperson.

Anyway, I got hooked on the idea that if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

French is cool, for example. Joseph, an expatriate American living in France, brought up the political implications of this in something he posted in January to a bunch of folks with whom I correspond.

A topic that I have been intending to bring up, but have not had the time to develop, concerns a peculiarity of the French language. Now all but dead in English, the "subjunctive" mode is still going strong in French. For those unfamiliar, one could reasonably say that the French have an entire tense dedicated to doubt. I can't help but see a connection between this and issues of national character and the impact that this has on political life.

Does not the requirement that one use this mode after all kinds of expressions, which in English do not appear to contain any doubt, have an impact on discourse, forcing both speaker and listener to recognize the presence of doubt?

Good question, and my friends kicked that about for a bit.

I think now John Kerry worried about this. Joshua Kurlantzick in the current New Yorker points out that in private settings Kerry has chatted in excellent French with Alain de Chalvron, Washington bureau chief for the French radio service France 2. So? It seems also that now, when asked a question in French at an open press conference, Kerry pretends not to be able to understand it, and doesn't give an answer at all. Curious.

The Kurlantzick item is here:

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
PARDON?
Joshua Kurlantzick, The New Yorker Issue of 2004-04-19 and 26 - Posted 2004-04-12

Here's some detail:

Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn't had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the "Axis of Weasel," along with a reticent White House, which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited. They knew about Kerry: he went to a Swiss boarding school, he has a cousin who ran for the French Presidency, and he supposedly wooed Teresa Heinz by impressing her with his fluent French.

For a time, Kerry seemed equally enthusiastic about the French reporters covering his campaign. "He was quite accessible in Iowa and New Hampshire," de Chalvron said the other day, in his office in Washington. "He understands French very well. His words are correct and sometimes even sophisticated. I asked him, `How can you have this life? It must be terrible, crisscrossing the country.' Kerry answered, `C'est affreux'--`It's awful.'" De Chalvron's voice rose with admiration. "Affreux, it's not a very usual word. It's something a French person can use easily, but Kerry could have said, `Yes, it's terrible,' instead of going to pick a more difficult word."

Well, that's no more than amusing language trivial.

Except for the months that followed. Kurlantzick notes that Republicans have long suggested Kerry is too... continental? And I have mentioned that in his daily Wall Street Journal column James Taranto always refers to Kerry as the "haughty French-looking senator, who, by the way, served in Vietnam." This did all start when Commerce Secretary Donald Evans told reporters that Kerry "looks French." That stuck. And Kurlantzick reminds us that conservatives complained about Kerry talking about endorsements of him from foreign leaders, and how right-wing talk-show hosts now refer to Kerry as "Monsieur Kerry" and "Jean Cheri."

Kurlantzick adds there was a final straw, and a sudden shift:

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist known for identifying the subconscious associations that people from various cultures make in the "reptilian" part of their brains, had offered to become the Senator's Gallic Naomi Wolf, devising ways for him to rid his speaking style of French influences.

Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. "During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq," de Chalvron recalled. "He didn't answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn't want to take a question that was not in English." Lo?ck Berrou, the United States bureau chief for de Chalvron's competitor, TF1, has been having similar problems. Berrou chatted in French with Kerry on a commercial flight last year; the Senator reminisced about his family's country house in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a village in Brittany, where Kerry's cousin is the mayor. "We've pushed hard to get an interview with him, and no answer," Berrou says.

Family members have apparently been put on a leash as well. Kerry's wife, Berrou says, "speaks with us in French with no problem, and her press attach? has to pull her by the shirt to get her away from us."

Ah well.

Kurlantzick lets us know this English-only rule doesn't seem to hold when Kerry is speaking off the record. In fact, he says on his campaign plane recently, Kerry carried on a lively conversation with de Chalvron in French.

The other day, in his office, de Chalvron showed footage of Kerry bringing hot towels to foreign journalists in the back of the plane and bantering with Parisian reporters about his chances. De Chalvron was perplexed. "For us, to speak any other language and have an open view of the world, for a President, should be a plus," he said.

Mais, non! Kerry knows better.

And this:

As for an on-the-record interview, de Chalvron is still trying, but Kerry's campaign has not responded. He did, however, recently land an interview with Pat Robertson, who told him, "Jean Fran?ois Kerry will never be elected."

You don't mess with Pat Robertson. Pat tells many people how to vote, and they do. That has something to do with jesus but I'm not sure what.

Geoffrey K. Pullum over at the site Language Log (University of Pennsylvania) has a few comments on all this -

... The last thing you want in American politics, apparently, is to be captured on camera understanding French, let alone speaking it. Rush Limbaugh would start portraying you as hardly American at all (he already does this with Kerry, in fact, having heard about these suspicious francophone abilities on the grapevine).

Geoff Nunberg pointed out to me that in Nebraska they once passed a law making it illegal to teach foreign languages in the schools, period. Foreign language learning is now, like sodomy, legal in all states; but these are not freedoms that a politician should brag about taking advantage of. Such is the determined linguistic isolationism of the USA. I would have thought that to have a US president (for once) who could argue fluently and convincingly in the native language of some other head of state would be a fantastic asset. But instead it is perceived as a kind of disloyalty, evidence of being an untrustworthy egghead, and you would lose millions of votes over it. It's both depressing and amazing.

Yes, but I think it circles back to the comment from Joseph I cited up top.

Learning another language can be dangerous. I can have you thinking is ways that could be disturbing. As I said, if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

I suspect someone knows if you learn French you might find yourself slipping into the subjunctive mode, as it were. You might think new thoughts. You might start doubting things. And we cannot have that, can we? Doubting is so very... French.

The word nuance is French, and as Bush says, he doesn't do nuance. Most Americans don't. The language we use doesn't as easily allow it. Tant pis.

Posted by Alan at 21:50 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: World View

On delusion, mercenaries, Steubenville, Ohio and DeKalb, Georgia. Two friends from France comment on privatization.

My American friend in France, Joseph, glanced through my weekly "magazine" site Just Above Sunset and noted the discussion of why "Lawrence of Arabia" is an appropriate film to consider these days (here) - and the item on George Bush's odd sense of reality (here). He was particularly amused by William Saletan's take on Bush I cited -

See Trust, Don't Verify
Bush's incredible definition of credibility.
William Saletan - SLATE.COM - Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 3:27 AM PT

Joseph said he was struck with a question - "If we tend to view history through the prism of popular movies, does that make Bush the 'Momento' president?"

Ah yes, the movie we need to pay attention to is "Lawrence of Arabia" -- but the move we actually get is "Memento." I dozed off on the sofa this afternoon and woke up to some political talk show on the television - or was it Abbott and Costello doing that "Who's On First?" routine? Heck, if we're going to be stuck in some movie I was hoping for something better - Peter Sellers in "A Shot in the Dark" or something.

Joseph further commented -

By the way, now that this thing has turned into the fiasco that most of us said it would, I wonder what your "unnamed friend" is saying these days... Hey, the mistake is understandable. We're a nation that admires CEOs, we wanted a CEO president. Now that the nation and the armed services are being run efficiently, like a proper corporation (just forget how far we're in the red) I hope that we're all happy with the result.

I told Joseph I shall see my "unnamed friend" in a week or two - my conservative buddy is off at a trade show in Vegas this week and one somewhere else after that. I suspect he will be silent on these matters. Bush said he'd run the country as a CEO would, and Bush does have an MBA of course - but every company he was involved with went under. There are CEO's - then there are CEO's.

What I find curious, and something I find troubling, is that in addition to our 130,000 troops in Iraq, we also have more than 20,000 "private contract" troops we pay quite handsomely. They've just this week been "tasked" with providing protection for the "Green Zone" - the only safe place in Baghdad, with all the palaces and fancy hotels and former government edifices, where Viceroy Bremer works. This is to free up our "public" troops to go out and fix the larger country in whatever way they can. This is a one hundred million dollar contract.

These "private contract troops" do pretty much what our soldiers do - but get paid much more and operate under no Geneva Convention crap at all. And, in a CEO kind of way, you see the future. The war is becoming "privatized" - we're paying companies like Blackwater Security (it was their guys who got strung from the bridge in Fallujah) to do the dirty work - and that would be the wet work (targeted assassinations) and collective punishment (snipers taking out ambulances and children for maximum psychological effect). We can say "our forces" don't do such things, and that is perfectly true. Pretty clever. The mistake France made in Algeria in the late fifties is that they used the regular army for torture and such things. The truth finally came out and there was no deniability. We've learned a few things since then.

Who are these guys? Some are former members of the South African Defense Force and South African Police. Hired guns. Guy who took out politicians who didn't much like apartheid. Try this regarding one of the four killed in Fallujah:

Gray Branfield, 55, admitted to being part of a death squad which gunned down Joe Gqabi, the ANC's chief representative and Umkhonto weSizwe operational head in Zimbabwe on July 31 1981. Gqabi was shot 19 times when three assassins ambushed him as he reversed down the driveway of his Harare home.

Nice guy! Well, he had marketable skills.

As another fiend in Paris, Ric Erickson, commented,

In normal, not CEO, English - these 'private contract troops' are mercenaries.

MERCENARIES.

The Romans used them effectively for longer than the USA has existed; and the Nazis used them - forced them - but when the steam or money ran out, the mercenaries couldn't save the ballgame. They saved they own asses.

Maybe so.

But we have used them before. They helped us become what we are. Remember the Hessians we paid to help us win the war against England, our own revolution? We paid Germans - von Steuben and de Kalb and their troops - to fight the redcoats for us. And we honored Baron von Steuben by naming one of our cities after him - Steubenville, Ohio. Not much of an honor, for those of you who have been there - Dean Martin's hometown, rusting and dead on the river west of Pittsburgh. But it was a nice gesture. And then there is DeKalb, Georgia. Well, maybe we didn't like these guys.

Anyway, for more background on our current pseudo-Hessian assassins, the New York Times gives enormous detail here and you will find a comment at American Prospect here.

These guys represent the second largest force in Iraq right now. There are more of them than there are Brits in Basra.

We've privatized the war a bit. I'm not sure where that will take us.

Regarding privatization, I see the government over there is France is working hard at privatizing all these large industries - more efficient and all that. Ric and Joseph will have holy hell to pay for that this year with demonstrations and strikes.

But have Chirac's ministers considered privatizing the army? We're working on that over here. Remember your Bonaparte - L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace !

Ric Erickson gives details:

It's pretty neat. On the state-owned radio, state-owned EDF (electricity supplier) is advertising itself in preparation for being sold via the stock market. France wants to sell a less than controlling interest in EDF - to conform to EU regulations that state enterprises allow competition. Who, besides EDF, owns and operates the electricity generators and the transmission lines in France? How will it be possible for a home owner to buy electrictity from 'Electros de Espana' for example? Does the state intend to reimburse the current stockholders - the taxpayers?

Well, out here in California we dealt with this when we deregulated the electric markets two years ago. Anyone anywhere - from as far away as Texas and Canada - could feed the grid and get paid for it. So they all got together and withheld power to force up the prices - and we had blackouts and the price of electricity went up three and four hundred percent for a bit. The state was forced into long-term contracts at fixed high prices and went billions into debt just to keep the lights on. Thus the free market works - many people made quite a lot of money. France is next.

But Ric points out the privatization business in France is getting folks worked up.

Former law-and-order interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now head of finance at Bercy, has just frozen 7 billion euros of planned state expenditure. Unemployment figures have been revised upward. Meanwhile, 650,000 unemployed cut from benefits on January 1st have won a court case, reinstating their benefits.

The 'new' government that resulted from the recent massive slap in the face from voters seems to be more hapless than the one it replaced. The government, now facing coming EU elections, is worried but seems incapable of veering from its course to total disaster. Yesterday, Chirac's recycled prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had the disagreeable task of meeting with all of the recently elected regional presidents - some 20 out of 21 who are members of parties other than the government's. C'est ? dire - Socialists, Greens, Communists and other lefties.

I don't sense that there is a huge swell of support for the parties of the left. Rather, it seems like a total rejection of the last right-wing government's policies, and of the recycled new right-wing government's policies. All so-called 'reforms' have either been abandoned or are on hold. The emperor has no new clothes.

Not only has Chirac seemed to have lost his political 'touch,' but the so-called new UMP party created to keep him in office is losing its cools -- blowing them. Popularity polls show only 30-40 percent approval for Chirac and Raffarin, with the latter getting worse notes than his boss. The percentage of 'don't-knows' polled is very small.

The mayor of Paris is not waiting patiently until Chirac is out of office and loses his immunity from prosecution, to charge him with embezzling city funds. Maybe not so grave; maybe only a court order forcing restitution... But it gives Chirac a strong incentive to re-run for President. He only needs a miracle.

These days, 'l'audace' is nowhere in evidence.

Indeed. Privatizing everything in France to make it look more like America seems to be meeting resistance. There's little resistance here, but we're not French, and proud of it.

Is Chirac as detached from reality as Bush (see above)? Ric comments on Bush - "At least he is consistently deluded, instead of only randomly."

Cold comfort.

Posted by Alan at 15:14 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 20 April 2004 15:31 PDT home

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