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[Martiju]

Bush’s chef tricked by French TV show

(edited highlights):

President Bush’s personal chef has been humiliated by a team of French practical jokers who tempted him with a job offer to desert his employer and go to work for President Jacques Chirac.

On Wednesday evening he was due to attend a party at the Elysee Palace given by the French leader’s wife, Bernadette. That afternoon a French television company dispatched a Bernadette Chirac look-alike to his hotel. She was accompanied by a producer, doubling as her secretary, and hidden cameras.

When they arrived, the supposed secretary asked Scheib to go to the hotel lobby as Chirac needed to see him urgently about a very delicate matter. Scheib arrived and greeted the look-alike warmly.

President Chirac, she said, was sick of French food. He had once mentioned that he liked calves’ head and he had been eating snouts and lips at official dinners ever since. What he longed for was some good American cooking, hamburgers and barbecue. Would Scheib agree to leave Bush and come to work at the Elysee?

“He fell completely into the trap. He said, ‘I can’t leave George Bush just like that, I must think, this is a great honor for me.’ But he did not refuse.” The phony Bernadette Chirac pressed him, saying her husband wanted a reply at the party in the evening, in three hours’ time. Scheib said he needed half an hour to think, if she could wait.

Scheib, he added, “took it very badly. He was extremely angry and told us this was going to create a diplomatic incident.”

Just heard this one on the news. Puerile, yes - ‘potentially sparking [more] diplomatic problems’ - I don’t think so!!

I can see that this is part of the French media mocking American culture a bit but is it really any more serious than that?

What does everyone think?