Sarko the Appeaser: France’s New Vichy Regime

- for The Free Market News Network, 11/06/07

As the Congress of Appeasers, Accommodators and Enablers readies to hear France’s new leader, they might prep with a showing of Casablanca. At no time have the Peeps more resembled the vacillating and ineffectual crowd at Rick’s Cafe Americain. Today Charles Schulmer, the Senator for New York, takes out an op-ed in the NYT’s to claim his credibility on voting for Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, who doesn’t think that half drowning a woman or man with a bag over her head constitutes torture. That is he isn’t sure. Schulmer follows in the footsteps of his Weak Sister from California, Diane Feinstein, who this week also cast her vote for torture with resolute conviction.

Say what you like about France, where I spent some of the best moments of my ‘tweens; it generally knows the difference between love and rape. But that cannot be said about Nicolas Sarkozy, the recently elected President of France.

Truth is, when Sarkozy visited us first off here in New Hampshire after his election we were only vaguely amused. I mean, I’ve been to Paris and I’ve been to Lake Winnipesaukee. If he felt that our live-free-or-die motto suggested that we would follow the horde to Bush’s war against the dark-skinned non-Christians of the world, he completely missed the point. And how ridiculous could it be to run for President of France pretending to emulate those of us in the northern mountains of New Hampshire? Or wearing a NYPD t-shirt?

That his wife slipped back to France under cover of night was the tip off that beneath the veneer of Austrian-Hungary Empire stuff (Sarko’s paternal line . . . startling that the French would even think of going there at all . . . ) France still had instincts.

As it is widely reported, “Sarko the American” as he is known in France, makes his first official visit to Washington today to try to “ . . . heal the wounds over France's opposition to the Iraq war . . . ” He hopes to affirm that he is a sure ally of President Bush in his most trying hour.

Good to have a friend, even one who fauns. Will Bush laugh at him when he speaks French as he did in New Hampshire? Reports tell us that there is a “collective swoon” in the Oval Office over this Frenchman. That should be a tip off: This President, like most Texans, hates France and everything about France and always did. Why do they like this Frenchman?

It seems so long ago now but as I recall, it was Donald Rumsfeld that called Bush’s New World Order, “old Europe” and “new Europe.” New Europe consisted of our vassal state England, our two pseudo-American states Poland (created by recent American immigrants in New York and Maryland) and the Czech Republic (created by American lost-in-the-ozone poet numbsculls in the English Department), Turkey and someplace else about the size of Ellis Island with a name I can’t pronounce. I got the willies at the time because at the beginning Bush’s plan – the pre-emptive policy – seemed coined originally by Wilhelm II and the only main allies at the time were England and Italy. Then when Rumsfeld got on the Jim Lehrer show to talk about how Hitler nationalized the German economy, his arms started waving and he got really animated, much like General ‘Buck” Turginson (that would be George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove.

Today, Poland, governed by twins - which is a nice touch for a country that can’t remember who it is - is opting out as it realizes that the price of being a pseudo-American Euro-state is high, and that these “new Europe” satellites are merely Gurka forces – Foreign Devils fighting on our behalf – in our global war on Islam and missile sites to territorialize Russia.

Now England is entirely screwed; it is neither Euro nor American and will now be continually cursed by its direct neighbors because it cast its lot with Bush. Turkey is now among our greatest enemies. And General What’s-His-Name in Pakistan, hoping to develop a new nazi-burgher class globally, is about to lose his funny CIA money.

But, alors, now here in the darkest hour, France comes to our aid.

Congress should turn this man out: He comes to us as Marshall Petain came to France. As you recall, when the messenger from the French Underground was shot down at the beginning of Casablanca, he fell beneath a large portrait of Marshall Petain, who accommodated the German invaders in the Vichy regime. Likewise Sarkozy accommodates and appeases today a President without moral bearings and a Congress without a backbone.

We are now at a Vichy moment; a moment like that portrayed in the movie Casablanca, about an incident at Rick’s Café American which turned the world from accommodation to character. Today we are all Monsieur Rick, tormented and torn between man and mouse, waiting for the man of courage and valor and resolute conviction to arrive and order the playing of La Marseillaise.

That man is not Nicolas Sarkozy.

Note to Congress: If you Google YouTube – Casablanca – French National Anthem you can view Paul Heinreid, taking his cue from Humphrey Bogart, and ordering the local band at Rick’s to play La Marseillaise, and drowning out the Vichy Swine in the greatest two minutes in the history of electricity.

Suggested reading for Sarko the American and the new torture buffs in Congress and in the Oval Office: Kranz Kafka: In the Penal Colony, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and much more, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux’s: Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, Anti-Memoirs.

One question: Who raised you?