The Idiot in France

Bombing in Paris
Fri. 02 Feb 2007
The Wall Street Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
February 2, 2007; Page A18

Barring a surprise, Jacques Chirac's 45-year run in politics is likely to end later this year when the French elect a new leader. They're certainly going to miss him in Tehran.

The French president gave a fitting valedictory in an interview published yesterday in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Le Nouvel Observateur. Speaking Monday, Mr. Chirac reversed years of public rhetoric by proclaiming himself indifferent to a nuclear-armed Iran. "Having one [atomic bomb], maybe a second one a little later, well, that's not very dangerous," Mr. Chirac said. "Where will [Iran] drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed to the ground."

His aides quickly realized their man had committed the gaffe of saying what everyone thought he really believed, and so left out those passages from an official interview transcript. The journalists also got a return call from the president on Tuesday, in which he noted that "I should have paid better attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record."

We can guess they needed no such clarification in Tehran. On or off the record, Mr. Chirac was merely confirming what the mullahs have long believed, which is that the Europeans simply aren't serious about preventing them from going nuclear.

Monsieur le president's version of mutual assured nuclear destruction could also stand some parsing. He seems to think that Tehran would never launch an attack for fear it would be annihilated in return. But assuming Israel were destroyed first, what other country would risk a counterattack itself by nuking millions of Iranian civilians to avenge Israel? France? The same country that wouldn't even let U.S. jets fly over its territory to drop a few conventional bombs on Libya? We doubt many Israelis will share Mr. Chirac's faith in nuclear deterrence against Islamists who prize martyrdom.

Mr. Chirac won't make public his political intentions before March, but in one recent poll only 2% of the French want him on the ballot again. Privately, Chirac aides believe that only a foreign policy crisis -- say, over Iran -- could revive his political career. His remarks this week make it more likely that Iran will become a crisis, but at least we can hope he won't be around to make it any worse.

February 1, 2007
France Tells U.S. to Sign Climate Pacts or Face Tax
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS, Jan. 31 — President Jacques Chirac has demanded that the United States sign both the Kyoto climate protocol and a future agreement that will take effect when the Kyoto accord runs out in 2012.

He said that he welcomed last week’s State of the Union address in which President Bush described climate change as a “serious challenge” and acknowledged that a growing number of American politicians now favor emissions cuts.

But he warned that if the United States did not sign the agreements, a carbon tax across Europe on imports from nations that have not signed the Kyoto treaty could be imposed to try to force compliance. The European Union is the largest export market for American goods.

“A carbon tax is inevitable,” Mr. Chirac said. “If it is European, and I believe it will be European, then it will all the same have a certain influence because it means that all the countries that do not accept the minimum obligations will be obliged to pay.”

Trade lawyers have been divided over the legality of a carbon tax, with some saying it would run counter to international trade rules. But Mr. Chirac said other European countries would back it. “I believe we will have all of the European Union,” he said.

These tidbits were both out of the Traitorous Times interview with Wack Chirac. This is the leadership that Clinton, Kerry, and Kennedy want to emulate and base how we do things in this country on. The first thing we need to do is expose the French for what they are and what they have been since WWII, The Vichey. They have been duplicit with every nation that has been openly hostile to the west. They have lost every war they have been in in the past two centuries, yet they feel they can rule the world through courts and policies out of Belgium dictated from Paris. The second and more important thing that needs to take place is a tripling of all import taxes on any goods out of the EU. We can call it a Police Tax. Since we have to police the world, and fight the people they are arming we need to make them pay for it.