President G.W. Bush is mending fences in Europe. He’s making a show of being friendly with Mr. Chirac. Okay, folks, can we finally have an end to our silly, childish hate-the-French game? The boycott of French goods didn’t hurt them a bit, according to published trade figures. Folks in France didn’t give a rat’s cul about freedom fries; they still sold all the wine they could make. It’s time to French-kiss and make up. President Bush says we don’t hate the French anymore. Can we make it true?
What President Bush was doing is called diplomacy. That is part of his job and I wouldn’t have asked for less. However, I am not a diplomat and if I was I’d be retired. There is no requirements for me to mend things. I’ve learned to like other wines and there are many other places to go in this world besides France.
That thing about the “Freedom Fries” was good for one two minute spot on the news. That’s about all the notice it got except from people like you. You give up the “Freedom Fries” crap and I’ll think about being friendlier to the French. Not before.
Kniz, I didn’t start the “Freedom Fries crap.” The fact that it lasted more than a day or two was because it moved to the US Senate dining room. “People like” US senators caused all this hubbub over the fact that a sovereign nation refused to believe the flimsy case for war (which turned out to be incorrect) that our president and secretary of state gave to the world’s nations.
I never embraced the freedom fries nonsense, so how can I give it up? The only thing France did to irk you was to show better judgement than my government showed. I don’t think that rates a boycott.
I’ve never hated the French; after all, they helped give us our independence.
I do hate the boneheaded morons who came up with the “Freedom Fries” crap, and the horror of starting a war with Iraq on false pretenses. Not with my country you don’t… :mad:
While French hating may be an all time high, making fun of them isn’t a recent phenomenon. “Cheese eating surrender monkeys” entered the lexicon well before the current diplomatic debacle. It probably started with the very first English colonists.
Some choice quotes from years past:
“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by prostitutes.”
—Mark Twain
“I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.”
— General George S. Patton
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.”
–Norman Schwartzkopf
“The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.”
— P.J O’Rourke (1989)
Trading barbs across the Atlantic isn’t going to end any time soon. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite korny jokes from years ago, I heard it sometime in the mid 90’s. Its humor stems from the fact that it really doesn’t make much sense, but it’s such a stupid shot at the French that it’s pretty damn funny if you sell it right.
Q.What’s the difference between French toast and regular toast?
Before anybody comes along to correct the above, let me clarify that I meant using the French as the butt of jokes started with the first colonists. I’m fairly certain, however, that Groundskeeper Willie did not come over on the Mayflower.
FTR, I only saw Freedom Fries listed in a little diner in upstate NY, and that’s right across the street from an Air National Guard base. I never heard anyone say “freedom fries” instead of “french fries” (although to be fair, I usually order just ‘fries’) and when a couple of friends did say freedom fries, we all laughed at how silly it sounded.
Then again, I live in NYC and not The Real America.
You yanks were only amateurs at hating the French in any case. It’s like your attempts at soccer - you try but you haven’t got the history. Also you live too far away to get really annoyed
Now we English on the other hand are 22 miles away and have been at their throats for 1,000 years. They are the Washington Generals to our Military’s Harlem Globe Trotters
The boycott of French goods was fucking idiotic from day one. IIRC, 1/3 of the French were for the war, so of all the French hurt by not buying the goods, a good third of them supported the moron pouring his French wine into the sewer. And there’s the American folks who make a living importing French goods, those folks get hurt by a boycott as well.
The whole point to slamming France was not that they disagreed with us. It was not that they didn’t want to go to war. It was a reaction to the sheer hypocritical, backstabbing attitude of the Chirac regime, which chastised us for our warmongering while making money hand-over-fist selling weapons and electronics to Saddam. Were it not for France’s interference, we might have been able to present a united front and force Saddam to reveal the truth about his weapons programs. But France was more interested in selling Iraq the weapons systems that would be used against our soldiers than in working for a peaceful resolution.
Sure, Bush deserves plenty of blame for the Iraq clusterfuck. But France (read: Chirac) stabbed us in the back and then further undermined our efforts by claiming the moral high ground on the world stage.
A great many Americans are dead and the United States has suffered irreparable damage to its image. The deceit of the French government played a major role in both.
Every so often, you HEARD about a boycott of all things French, but I’d be astonished if more than a few people actually made any real effort to boycott French products.
Did airlines in the U.S. stop buying from Airbus? Nope.
Did U.S. auto makers stop buying Michelin tires? Nope.
Did any ordinary, average American who needed a pen or a cigarette lighter shun Bics? Of course not.
Now, American TOURISM in France definitely went way down. So, French hotels and restaurants probably noticed a major downturn in business. But French exports to the U.S. probably didn’t drop at all.
As for “Freedom Fries,” I heard dozens of left-leaning comedians make jokes about them, but I’ve yet to come across a restaurant in the U.S. that ever called them anything but “French Fries” (noplace I ever encountered stopped serving French toast or French’s mustard, either!).
[QUOTE=Kizarvexius]
Were it not for France’s interference, we might have been able to present a united front and force Saddam to reveal the truth about his weapons programs. QUOTE]
Hmm. The way I recall (admittedly without any checking of cites), before the invasion Saddam was saying he didn’t have any WMD. And then it turned out that he didn’t. How exactly could he have been revealed to be any more truthful than that?
It could have revealed that he was telling the truth for perhaps the first time in thirty years.
Saddam played a brilliant game of brinksmanship for years after the First Gulf War. He’d allow inspectors access to this site, but not to that one. Or he’d make sure that when they got to a particular site, they had to wait for hours before being admitted, leaving telltale signs that something had been covered up or carted off. Then he kicked out all the inspectors. Only when we could convince the U.N. that perhaps something should be done could we put enough pressure on Saddam to make him play ball. But of course he never played by our rules, because if he proved to our satisfaction that he had destroyed all existing WMDs and ceased further production, he would have given up his ace in the hole. Having these things (or letting the enemy think he did) was what made him a power to be feared in the region. It kept the Kurds in line, kept Iran from reinitiating hostilities, and allowed him to rattle his saber at Israel (always a good PR move among the Arab states).
To anyone who knew Saddam’s history or way of operating, the insistance on his part that he had no WMDs seemed little more than yet another ploy. Under U.N. pressure, Iraq turned over a collection of documents that (they claimed) proved his case. Those who examined them stated that calling them incomplete would have been high praise.
Had France (along with Germany and Russia, who were also benefitting from under-the-table deals with Saddam) stood with us, we might have been able to force Saddam to play by our rules. But he proved highly skillful at sowing dissent among what should have been a strong alliance. And Chirac, Shroeder, and Putin proved more than willing to go along with him.
The capacity for people to refuse to admit mistakes, and come up with new rationalizations, just never ceases to amaze me.
Rather than blaming France for the fiasco, why not blame the country that, you know, actually started the war?
Your entire argument is premised on the notion that the United States WOULD, in fact, have gone the peaceful route if France, Germany et al. had complied with their wishes. I simply don’t believe that’s true; this may come as something of a shock, but damn near nobody outside the USA believes that. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests the U.S. planned to invade Iraq no matter what it did. After all, there were weapons inspections ongoing, with the USA did not allow to be completed, and during the invasion the U.S. put virtually no effort into securing “suspected” WMD sites, lending credence to the theory that even they didn’t believe there were any WMDs there. It is apparently the case that the U.S. would have invaded even had Saddam Hussein voluntary gone into exile. There was no way the U.S. would be stopped in its invasion plans. There WAS no peaceful solution, and nothing France could have done one way or another would have changed that.
Whether France was making money under the table or not is really quite irrelevant; the U.S. was invading. There were no WMDs, and the U.S. knew it. Saddam Hussein was not some brilliant strategist, as you seem to be claiming; he was a tyrant who never understood international relations at all, and whose country collapsed like a house of cards in the face of a fraction of U.S. military power, and now he’s in jail like a common criminal. Some cagey opponent he was.
My dislike for the French didn’t start during the Iraqi invasion. It started when I visited Paris. I’ve been treated well when I traveled. I’m a polite visitor who makes an attempt to speak a little bit of the language and “do as the Romans do.” Up until I went to France, I was made to feel welcome in every country I visited, including Mexico, Germany, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Austria, England, Scotland, Greece, Kenya, and Tanzania.
The French were rude and obnoxious. The two years of French language I studied got me by in Belgium and Switzerland, but the Parisians pretended not to understand. With one exception, the waiters and store clerks were snooty, and the museum guides unhelpful. Overall, I felt uncomfortable much of the time I was there.
So yes, astorian, I make a point of not buying French products. In all of my travels, the French were the most arrogant and unpleasant people I met. They have some great museums, but it’s not worth going to Paris to see them, and I have no intention of “making nice” with them just because George Bush is being diplomatic.
