Personally, I will continue to bash the French mercilessly, much as one never lets a sibling get away with anything without proper mocking. I bash 'em because I love the bastards. I’ll continue to drink their excellent wine, while reminding them that nearly all their grapes are American in origin, and continue to eat their cheese, desperate the hilarious proliferation of types. The fries will always be French, no matter what some jingoistic restaurant owner with a dull normal IQ and a hard-on for flags thinks. Their wine will still be good no matter that some other restaurant owner thinks he shapes political policy by his rotgut of choice. On the military front, I will never let Napoleon, Vauban, and Carnot be mentioned without gleefully bringing up Petain and Napoleon III.
In the end, we have an enormous shared cultural heritage with the French, and it’s a shame that we don’t agree more often. Yes, so they don’t support us in Iraq. Americans don’t all support Americans attacking Iraq. When this crap has all blown over and Bush has shot his load, the 90% of the American population that can’t find France on a map will go back to whatever the hell it is they do for fun, and the rest of us can appreciate France without it being a fucking political statement.
See, french fries don’t come from France, yet we still want to rename them. It goes along with the damn Dutchies brewing Heiney and us thinking it’s German. So you see, I was right all along.
::covering ass::
I’m just curious as to what has happened to US croissant consumption recently. French pastry fashioned after an Islamic religious icon-- gasp – sounds like fixin’s for a treasonous teatime.
I agree; enough ! Our neighborhood liquor store is in on the act; yesterday he “gave away” all French wine in his store. Here was his picture in the paper: backed by an American flag, he’s standing stalwart with a look of fiery indignation in his eye as he stares into the camera.
Personally, I like the comment a friend of mine who grew up in Paris made on the subject.
“The Americans complain about our view on the war because they love us dearly. Since they don’t care for Russia, China, or Germany, they can ignore what they say, but what the French think truly concerns the U.S.”
I can’t understand this. The guy is second on the all-time saves list, he’s playing for the hometown team he rooted for as a kid, and he’s a great clubhouse guy who is respected by both teammates and opponents.
I just hope he can come back from his elbow surgery to provide help as a lefty setup man.
Russia and China are chock-full of playah hate-ahs, commies, and other unsavory types. Might as well write off what comes out there. Anyways, I don’t see Russia and China bending over backwards to find peaceful solutions to Chechnya, Tibet, etc.
Most of the brave Germans died about 58 years ago. So what you have now is largely the offspring of those who hid under tables. So long as they don’t start getting all reminiscent about Sudetenland or some crap, it is safe to disregard them.
But France? Our nations were founded by similiarly-inspired revolutionaries. We’ve helped each other out so many times throughout history. And now they are playing the role of the 'ho to Saddams pimp? Come on, France. You won’t lose all of your Iraqi oil and weapons contracts after the war.
If we quit stamping our little foot over France, do we get to threaten to hold our breath until the Turkish parliament votes to let us use their country as a staging area?
Well, just for the sake of argument, Brutus, the French helped us in the Revolution more because they wanted to screw with the English than because they loved us. Remember reading about the war’s aftermath, when John Jay & our other ambassadors went behind France’s back to deal directly with the English because the French wanted to keep us relatively weak and confined to the Atlantic Seaboard?
As for WW1, there were these little things called the Zimmerman Note and unrestricted submarine warfare.
As for WW2, after Dec. 11, did we have any realistic choice?
