Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Frog in the Boiling Pot

It was not a good weekend for French President Black Jacques Chirac.

First, he was humiliated when his indolent people whom he thought he could simultaneously bulldoze and hornswoggle rejected his precious masterpiece of a European Union constitution by a double-digit margin.

Then, no doubt to try and pander to those who humiliated him for the next plebescite attempt, he extended both middle fingers at the Anglosphere by canning his Prime Minister, a man named Raffarin (so prominent a figure is he that I can't find mention that he has a given name), and replacing him with none other than our old, dear friend Dominuque de Villepin, whose claim to fame is making an absolute drooling, cretinous, knuckle-dragging sucker of Colin Powell on French support for the US in the UN-focused run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

And now, in the midst of a maelstrom of economic malaise caused by the very "social democratic" welfare state that the French people adamantly refuse to relinquish any part of, and unable to wave a magic wand and change the laws of economics, the trapped and reeling Chirac has criminal prosecution for his rampant corruption awaiting him if he can't hold onto his job in 2007.

Prosecutors in France are waiting for President Jacques Chirac to leave office so they can investigate corruption charges against the controversial French leader.

"Several prosecutors we talked to would love to have him," Fox News Channel's Greg Palkot reported on Monday. "But as long as he's in the president's chair, he's immune to any prosecution."

Once Chirac leaves office, however, "he could be prosecuted on a range of corruption charges," Palkot said.

Given that the French people are also of disjointed nose over their country's economic moribundity, two more years of it might just make them willing to entertain heresies like (GASP!) a turn to market-based policies. And look who would be waiting to exploit such a turn at Black Jacques' expense: Nicolas Sarkozy, the leader of the right-wing UMP, whom Chirac passed over for PM and forewent a golden opportunity to tarnish by association with his own unpopular regime.

It reminds me of the antics of Chirac's namesake from the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon. That Black Jacques repeatedly tries to dam up the stream that Bugs uses for a shower and to irrigate his carrot garden. So Bugs decides to outflank him by building a dam of his own further upstream. BJ responds by getting a cannon and blowing up Bugs' dam, only to find another one behind it. This sequence repeats several times until he sees Bugs standing atop "Grand Cooler Dam." When BJ tries to blow that one, the cannonball bounces off, hits him and drives him into a paddy wagon that takes him off the the hoosegow.

The Newsmax report ends with this graf:

Efforts are currently under way to arrange "something special for Chirac to preserve his immunity," Palkot said. "So far, those efforts have failed."
The French prez has met his Grand Cooler Dam, alright. And the last cannonball has just cleared the muzzle.

UPDATE: The Dutch threw their sabots into the machinery of EUnity today, by an even bigger margin.

Looks like it'll take a dictator to weld the Continent together now....