Chirac Lies, Frenchman Dies!

CNN confirms the death of an innocent Frenchman during the ongoing unrest in that country:

The first death of the riots was reported on Monday.Jean Jacques Le Chenadec, 61, a resident of the Paris suburb of Stains in the region of Seine-Saint-Denis, died from injuries suffered outside his apartment building Friday night, officials said. He had been hospitalized in a coma since the attack.

The French government will doubtless cast about for a way to blame this on Bush. But the current violence in and around Paris, and indeed across France, is at least indirectly a result of the French government's inability to examine its own inadequacies. Like numerous other governments, it chose to look away and use America as a whipping post, and now they're paying the price. But you'll probably never hear the slogan we used for our headline, because everything bad is, after all, a result of George W. Bush's transgressions, at least if you believe the propaganda spewing 24/7 from the MSM and from leftwing hate sites.

One is tempted to gloat or say, "I told you so," but that kind of simplistic, juvenile response is best off left with the left where it belongs. With thousands of vehicles and perhaps hundreds of schools and public buildings torched--most of them in the neighborhoods whose hapless residents could least afford this wanton destruction--the French, already reeling from the high unemployment policies of the increasingly enfeebled Chirac administration, continue to suffer mightily. So there's no point in piling on, no matter how bracing it might feel. The corrupt elite allow such stuff to happen through their churlishness and spinelessness, but the bourgeoisie, as usual, are the ones who bear the brunt of the inevitable violence that arises.

One wonders what causes such political paralysis in a country, such an inability to simply throw out the miscreants, but one must also to be careful to harbor that smug self assurance that it can't happen here. After all, after throwing her out, Georgians did eventually re-elect Cynthia McKinney, in spite of her continuing mindless demagoguery, proving that you can indeed fool some of the people all of the time.