Villepin getting ready to throw in the towel.
"There is misunderstanding and incomprehension about the direction of my action. I profoundly regret it,"
Bring in the ash and sackloth.
Asked if he might resign, Villepin said; "I'm not a man to give up."
... says Dominique.
Give everyone a job for life, with all the Nanny State trimmings, willya?
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12 comments:
villepin as the anti-christ - you guys are so sore over the iraq thing you're beating on him while he's on your side of that new issue. unbelievable.
It's more like Villepin, the limp-wristed aristocrat who tries who tinker with the Nanny State -- forgeddabout it. As I said, just give in, promise everyone tenure for life, 30 hours work-week, 6 weeks vacation, full health benefits, free education from kindergarten to PhD, free transportation, the works. Then sit back and enjoy the beauty of the French model, and its manifest superiority to the dreaded Anglo-Saxon, capitalisme sauvage model.
Just friendly advice to Villepin, no hard feelings over his little stiletto in between the back ribs way back when.
It's not a question of being "on our side". Vilepain is on no one's side but that of Vilepain.
Further Byzantine maneuvers.
Chirac said he signed the contested law out of respect for French institutions, noting that it had been passed by parliament and approved by the Constitutional Council. However, in a rare twist, he asked that the law not be applied.
Opposition politicians criticized that manoeuvre as "surrealistic" and "undemocratic."
Chirac's double-barrelled approach - keeping the law alive, at least in theory - was a face-saving measure for Villepin. But asking for a second bill was seen as a rebuff. A decision announced Saturday to turn the writing of that bill over to legislators - removing it from Villepin's hands - was viewed as a further insult.
Aahhh, those little stilettos in the back ribs! Is this what these guys live for?
By the way, do people actually work in France, or just talk about it?
re: do people work in france -
it depends on your perspective. by italian standards, we're stakhanovists.
Could be, but in my uninformed naivet'e of a typical Ricain, it looks like the French spend half their waking hours marching up and down the streets, burning cars, and smashing windows. That is _work_? Perhaps something is lost in translation...
you're right on the money, with your sharp observations, dude: the world is this simple.
i mean is this the argument ? dem french payple, they so lazy. and their PM, he so snooty ? surely you can do better.
Mais non, mais non -- burning cars with Molotov cocktails is hard, back-breaking work. My admiration is unbounded. And, clearly, the French are not lazy -- climbing the barricades, day in, day out, to 'epater le bourgeois, requires a motivation and abnegation that puts us all to shame.
OK, you boys quit fighting! Next thing you know you'll all be in the UMP together.
Look, the proper way of looking at this and I have told you all many times, is that Chirac/Vilpine tried to buy off the Left by opposing rationality in the Middle East.
It has turned out that they fooled even Pepe. Just lately in this blog he has accused Vilpine of having taken the moral way in his totally infantile grandstanding in front of all the great representatives of World Democracy and Human Rights like Mugabe and Kim and Qaddaffi at the UN Genital Assembly.
Well, the ploy has fallen through. Last summer, the muslims in the banlieues failed to stay bought and now the university kids aren't bought anymore either. The far right is being co-opted by Sarkozy, not him or Chirac, and so Chirac and Vilpine are alone, so alone.
Vilpine is ceratinly on the right on this economic issue, and schadenfreude over his failing at it is a feeling as childish as the urge to suck up to a bunch of goddamned headhunters at the UN so that daddy USA will have egg on his face.
Vilpine is right about economic reform. I hope he succeeds, because I have family in Europe and it would benefit them if he did. The way he hoped to gain this success was at the expense of the USA. This is shameful, but it would be worse (for me) to pay the price twice and have him fuck us here and fail Europe, too.
Amen to that, JJ. I too have family in Europe, and of course wish them well. But, as you say, schadenfreude is a powerful sentiment, especially after beeing betrayed by Vilepin, as we were. His proposed law was of course in the right spirit (employers can fire youngsters on probation -- duhhhh, it does not take a degree at LSE to grasp that), but evidently too little too late for the French. Once weened to the Nanny State, you can't go cold turkey, can you?
I would guess not. I sure would like to keep the allowance I had during college indefinitely. Fascist parents cut me off.
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