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French Lessons
George W. Bush isn't the first American to have had a hellish time dealing with our faux friends from France.
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“France and her honor are at stake,” Vichy’s Marshal P�tain told President Roosevelt. “We are attacked. We will defend ourselves.” Never mind that the U.S. troops were there to liberate them. (I had never realized my grandfather was lucky to part of the later D-Day invasion. He only had to be shot at by Nazis.)
The authors mean such stories to be damning stuff regarding the French — and they are — but it is not exactly flattering to the U.S. either. Like French foreign legionnaires, we always seem to want to forget and put these bad memories behind us.
As Miller’s National Review colleague Rob Long put it last year, “Well, mes amis, that’s France. And it’s our fault for getting tangled up with them…. The French have nothing to be sorry for: They’re simply acting French, as is their right. But what’s our excuse?”
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