The French Academy. Do not forget the English poet who said “As Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.” which came true. It is a stuck up idea, but one of their better ones. That and Voltaire’s comment about Admiral Byng. “The English occasionally shoot a few Admirals to encourage the others.”
There. I kinda sort defended the French. I don’t feel quite so much like a conquering monkey.
And if those frog and snail eating surrender monkeys object, I’ll…
Sorry.
By the way, who coined the phrase “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, which recently appeared in no less a magazine than “The Economist”?
Answering Stentor, the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” was first used by the character of Groundskeeper Willie in a mid-1990’s episode of “The Simpsons”. From there, it was used by commentator Jonas Goldberg for several years. Just as Goldberg was planning on dropping it, Rush Limbaugh started using it on his radio program, and it caught on from there.
(BTW, jsc1953, I don’t care for “Doonesbury”, and 1) my politics are to the left of his major detractors, and 2) I’m a (partially) Franco-American myself who didn’t care for all the “French-bashing” of recent months.)
Actually, this is in line with what’s been found so far. All laboratory-scale stuff. We have plenty of evidence that he’s been doing research into forbidden weapons, but no evidence that he’s actually made any recently. Granted, this is still pretty bad, but we were told that Saddam had huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons already produced. Destroying these huge stockpiles was the reason for going to war. And so far, none of the promised weapons have turned up.
OTOH, it could be that Saddam shipped them all out of Iraq before the war started. If this is the case, then the war promoted the proliferation of WMD rather than preventing it 
So I can actually add something that’s sorta on-topic, I’ll say that Doonesbury has always stuck me as being only slightly more intelligent than the editorial cartoon. Which isn’t saying much.