Nobody likes to lose, except maybe the left. That’s because it
HATES to lose.
What an outpouring since its debacle in France last Sunday. The
sky has fallen, the end is near. Workers of the world didn’t unite
last century. But it’s not too late to do so now. Only problem is
that the terrifying Jean Marie Le Pen enjoyed “gains in blue-collar
communities traditionally loyal to the left,” as columnist
E.J. Dionne, Jr. put it.
Even so, the 17 percent he won is hardly more than his usual
take. Scum Vichy nationalist that he’s been for years, the fact
remains he’s been a prominent player for nearly two decades and now
that he’s well into his seventies his bite may be missing a few
teeth. How extremist (as opposed to unsavory) is someone who’s
became a fixture in the political landscape?
Years ago Le Pen claimed that voters know that he says out loud
“what everyone else thinks on the quiet.” If that’s still the case,
the quiet thinking these days has to do with the country’s 5
million strong Arab minority and rising crime — and the left’s
haughtiness toward anyone concerned with law and order. But how
much quiet thinking also connects Le Pen’s appeal to the post-9/11
international climate and the fear that a concentrated Arab
minority will inevitably contain support groups for international
terrorism?
In the U.S. Le Pen is known as an inveterate anti-Semite. Yet
according to the Washington Post’s foreign affairs
columnist
Jim Hoagland, “in this campaign he appealed for Jewish and
other votes by promising to bring law and order” to
minority-dominated areas. In the Wall Street Journal,
Michael Ledeen
writes that Le Pen recently “surprised many by strongly
supporting Israel’s self-defense against Palestinian terrorism.” In
other words, it’s only a matter of time before Le Pen is denounced
by the left as the Ariel Sharon of France.
It’s a wonder that New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman hasn’t already done so. Perhaps he’s waiting to denounce
George Bush as the America’s Sharon first. Better than any lefty
out there, Krugman knows that all roads, even the Champs
Elysées, lead to post-Florida Bush America.
You have to read the whole
thing to appreciate what Charles De Gaulle would have termed
Krugman’s l’audace. Or, so to speak, simple gall. In brief
here’s his argument. Imagine an electorate, 20 percent of it
perpetually angry. In France that vote makes its impact in the
first round. In the runoff two weeks later, that anger will be
little felt, since (in this case) Jacques Chirac will doubtless
defeat Le Pen by a huge margin. But not so in the U.S., where the
angry 20 percent all reside in the Republican Party. So this is
what you’re left with:
“In the United States…the hard right has essentially been
co-opted by the Republican Party — or maybe it’s the other way
around. In this country people with views that are, in their way,
as extreme as Mr. Le Pen’s are in a position to put those
views into practice.”
And in case you missed that, he flushes it out some:
“What France’s election revealed is that we and the French have
more in common than either country would like to admit. There as
here, there turns out to be a lot of irrational anger lurking just
below the surface of politics as usual. The difference is that here
the angry people are already running the country.”
To be fair to Krugman, on the strength of his column it’s more
likely he’ll compare Tom DeLay or John Ashcroft to Ariel Sharon
before he ever does George W. Bush.
Krugman titles his piece, “The Angry People,” and he peppers his
copy with references to “angry” people, though he remains clueless
about his own deep-seated, distorting anger. But increasingly that
seems to be the style of those who claim they feel no anger. Take
Al Gore and the speech he delivered on Earth Day, which oozed with
contempt for the man who defeated him for the presidency:
“…during the campaign then-candidate Bush himself pledged to
bring about a reduction in greenhouse gases. Of course, the day
after he took his oath of honor and integrity, he made that his
very first broken promise.
“…as I said, I’ve put this behind me long since — but refresh
my memory a little bit — did a majority of the American people
endorse his policies in the election? He won the election and he is
our president, but he ought to be a little bit more careful about
claiming that a majority of the voters endorsed his policy payoffs
to polluters…
Has M. Le Pen ever charged, like Gore did, that the incumbent’s
administration, “instead of ensuring that our water is clean to
drink, they thought that maybe there wasn’t enough arsenic in the
drinking water.” If anything, that’s the kind of rhetoric you hear
coming out of Yassir Arafat’s camp.
Has M. Le Pen ever charged his opponents with selling out as
shrilly as Al Gore did in a lead New York Times op-ed
last Sunday?
“Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the environmental and
energy policies of our government are completely dominated by a
group of current and former oil and chemical company executives who
are trying to dismantle America’s ability to force them to reduce
the extremely dangerous levels of pollution in the earth’s
atmosphere….
“Other acts of sabotage are taking place behind the
scenes….”
Bush? “Sabotage”? In wartime?
