ISIS to determine outcome of next presidential election in France

When you think of a typical Frenchman,  do you picture a hale and hardy ninety-year-old white dude pedalling his bicycle through the verdant countryside with a big bagatelle and a jumbo flask of red wine in the carrier, while puffing on an unfiltered cigarette?

Or do you picture an alienated young man with dark skin cooped up in an urban high-rise, wondering why this cradle of modern secularism renders him a second-class citizen even though he was born there?

That guy on the bike is a stereotype, to be sure. He's of that generation who engineered all those goodies that Michael Moore never tires of reminding us of. He landed a good job straight out of school and between the annual mandatory three months of holidays and being on strike six months of the year only did an actual 5.2 years of work before hitting the mandatory retirement age of fifty, and life's been nothing but red wine, cigarettes, and bike rides ever since!

That other guy is a stereotype too, but like it or not, the population of alienated brown people in France is growing rapidly, while that other stereotype is fading away.

It hasn't helped that Hollande the Hapless has, over his mandate, further alienated both of those groups. Which brings us to the next election.

The so-called "centre-right" candidate next April is to be Francois Fillon, it was determined today. Fillon isn't any more centre-right than the socialist president as near as I can tell. Seems to be a bit more hawkish on taking benefits away from that guy on the bike. If Fillon has his way that guy will be renting a room in that urban high-rise from a Muslim family.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Getting to know other cultures is always a good thing, but forcing old Jean off his bike and off his wine and ciggies is just going to create animosity. Maybe Jean will decide he'd rather die... maybe that's the plan? Getting all those old fuckers off the pension rolls would be a huge money saver, after all.

So, even though the mainstream press already foresee the April election as a show-down between Fillon and Marine Le Pen, I don't see either of our stereotypical Frenchmen having any reason to vote for Fillon.

Much will depend on who represents the French Left. While Hollande wasn't much of a "socialist," France, unlike the US, actually has a genuine left polity. Given the right candidate for the times, and the candidate will not be selected until January, it's possible to see that the greater showdown could be between the Left Front and Le Pen.

Hollande has been a complete disaster. In the first place, he's spent virtually the entirety of his mandate with his head up BHL's ass. It's fine to have presidential advisers, but when their advice is consistently and disastrously wrong, you can't just blame the adviser and walk away.

Given the right Left candidate, I can see both our stereotypical Frenchmen voting Left Front, as well as a goodly portion of the electorate who voted Hollande in 2012. That could keep Le Pen out and bring a genuinely progressive and inclusive party to power.

Which is where ISIS comes in. The Europeans in general, and nobody more enthusiastically than the French, have been co-conspirators with the US in the project to destroy the Muslim nations of the Middle East. Whether we're saving the people from their tyrants or eliminating their weapons of mass destruction or whatever gloss we want to put on it, we've been busy destroying the Middle East. That has created both an unprecedented refugee crisis and ISIS. Not hard to figure out that those two phenomena are mutually reinforcing.

Spare me the bullshit head-scratching about the clash of civilizations and why they hate us; they hate us because we've been stealing their stuff and killing their kids for generations. Ask that alienated young Muslim in that high-rise. He knows, even as the savants and the political elite pretend they can't figure it out.

So France is five months out from a presidential election and awash with refugees from countries the West has been "liberating." A certain unknown percentage of those refugees will be hard-core radicals. A much larger percentage have at least some sympathy for that hard core. Every time one of those hard-core radicals explodes in a French shopping mall between now and April, Le Pens polling numbers will spike.

That's how ISIS will determine who becomes the next president of France.

US anti-Putin campaign will fracture NATO

There are growing fissures in the very foundations of NATO, the Western alliance that has been floundering, lost and without a focus, since the fall of the USSR.

French President Francois Hollande declared yesterday that the anti-Russian sanctions need to end. Political rivals both to the left and to the right of Hollande have been saying that all along, and the more that the French economy suffers by being at the pointy end of a self-serving American policy of engineering regime change in Russia, the more Hollande will disengage from the NATO bandwagon.

In Germany, Frau Merkel is still talking the talk, but opinion polls reveal she is speaking for herself, not for her country. Her position is building a welcome unity between bosses and workers in Germany!

In Italy, a similar view prevails. That's three very senior EU economies and critical NATO nations that are getting tired of American jingoism.

Turkey, the only Muslim NATO member and a crucial ally of the US for both its Middle East and Russia-Ukraine ambitions, just agreed to a pipe-line deal with the evil Putin.

Absent those four critical member states, NATO would look like a very different animal indeed. As a military alliance that once made some sense, it has been desperately casting about for busy-work for the last twenty years. In the process, it has become little more than a handmaid to American hegemonic designs.

NATO is long overdue for the dustbin of history!

Hollande the Magnificent has austerity for workers but an extra billion to combat climate change

Workers are stupid.

Can they not see that saving the world from climate change is more important than their jobs?

What's a job worth compared to climate change?

That's why Francois Hollande is prepared to sacrifice the working class for the greater good!

And that underlines yet again one of the more problematic aspects of democracy.

Workers vote.

In France, it's not looking like many will vote for Hollande the Conqueror in the next go-round.

Hollande is in a bit of a pickle, and neither he nor his army of well-paid advisers can figure out why. Has he not saved Mali? The CAR?

And have French warplanes not led the way in that apocalyptic war on the Towelheads of Terror in the Islamic State?

And yet his poll standings plummet?

What is a great leader desperate for re-election to do?

Why, save the entire planet from climate change of course!

After saving Africa from Africans, Hollande the Conqueror turns gaze on saving Middle East from Arabs

Hollande may be drowning in the polls, but he must be rising in the estimation of the esteemed BHL.

It was BHL after all, the man who saved Libya, who egged on the hapless Hollande in his pursuit of those mythical "spurs." And for Hollande, nothing else matters so long as he has the regard of the great BHL.

But those poll numbers are astonishingly dismal. Hollande has actually had the distinction of being named the worst politician in the world!

That can't possibly be fair... have those pollsters not heard of Stephen Harper? Or Bobby Mugabe?

Nevertheless, it is now estimated that if an election were held in the near future, both Le Pen and Sarkozy would make mincemeat of the hapless Hollande.

Be that as it may, the Conqueror has moved on from his rout of the evil-doers in Africa. Yes, there are still some loose ends to tie up, but by and large, African resources in the CAR and Mali have been made safe for democracy.

Thankfully, that has freed up the resources of the Republic to bring peace and freedom and democracy to Iraq yet again, as if they haven't had enough already.

No doubt Hollande is hoping for a bump in his polling numbers from this bold new venture.

Fat chance.

Does he not realize that there are more Arab immigrants in France than in any other of the Nations of Virtue?

He thinks bombing their homelands will make him more popular?

He really has been suckling at the BHL teat for much too long...

The only news event that has ever bumped Hollande's polling numbers was when he was caught out bumping that actress back in the spring.

Perhaps those invasions between the sheets are what Hollande does best. Forget the spurs, François, and for God's sake, stop listening to that imbecile BHL!

Putin Growls; the crass stupidity of Western media on Ukraine

There could be an almost infinite number of ways to portray the Russian government's disappointment over the fact that Petro Poroshenko has chosen to abrogate the cease-fire and ramp up the violence in Ukraine.

Putin disappointed.

Putin saddened.

Putin disturbed... etc.

Instead, we get Putin growls.

That's journalism with an agenda, and the agenda is obviously to demonize Putin, whose crime was to call for an extension of the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, a crime in which his co-conspirators were Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel.

Poroshenko was obviously open to the idea of extending the cease-fire as recently as yesterday. Who prevailed upon him to change his mind?