W. Regrets Almost Nothing
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Newsstands carry a whole magazine devoted to “La révolution OBAMA.” The papers are avidly following Obama’s post-Hillary quest to “cherche les femmes,” and on Friday, Le Figaro led with the headline that he had widened his lead over his “rival républicain.”
There was nothing on Le Figaro’s front page about that other American guy who was over here, munching on langoustes at the Élysée Palace with Sarko and the seductress Carla (animated and dazzling with a midnight blue dress and a hopelessly long, thin cigarette).
“You kind of wrote my political obituary tonight,” W. teased the French president after Sarko’s toast Friday night, adding that he still has six months left and a lot of work to do.
In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.Even as the Supreme Court slapped him back for the third time on the suffocation of civil liberties at Guantánamo, President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty. He celebrated European unity at the very instant it was falling apart, thanks to an Irish donnybrook.
Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.) A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV. The image of the U.S. abroad has improved slightly, according to a new Pew poll, but only in anticipation of seeing the back of this president.