Propornot?

Made a point of getting into town bright and early, in hope of avoiding last Saturday's debacle.

It worked! I got my weekend newspaper for ten bucks minus a handful of change... and there was nothing in it!

Well, that's not quite true. Mark MacKinnon had pretty much the entirety of the "Focus" section to himself for a major, and I mean major, effort about the origins of the Syrian "civil war." Most of his salient points about the actual origins were spelled out well over four years ago in this story, but he did have some original insights into what's become of the protagonists since then.

I was cheered to see a little less Trump this week. That's almost unfortunate after Trump moots a guy nick-named "Mad Dog" for SecDef.

I'm gonna have to re-see "Idiocracy" again before I make up my mind on that one... introducing your new Secretary of Defence, Mad Dog Mattis!

Get the fuck outta here!

But my actual propornot moment came when I read a story by Paul Waldie, who is apparently the Globe's "European correspondent." That's in addition to MacKinnon traipsing around Europe for months updating a story from 2012.

No wonder I'm paying over five bucks for my newspaper!

Anyway, Waldie gets pretty much a whole page in the first section to pontificate on what's wrong with France. Seems the French are mightily pissed with those gosh-darned socialists who have ruled the roost since 2012. They are yearning for the freedom and prosperity that only a right-wing government can bring.

I know this because nowhere in the story is there any hint whatsoever that there exists a substantial polity to the left of the so-called Socialists of Hollande.

Hollande and his party are "left" in the same sense that Hillary's Democratic Party is "left." As in, not really.

In the last French election the Left Front and a couple of fringe left parties garnered about 15% of the popular vote. By now, anybody who expected "left" policies from the centre-rightist "socialist" Hollande will be thoroughly disillusioned.

Will those voters swing right or swing to the real left? I'm guessing most of them will go to the left.

Even if only half of the ten million voters who marked their ballots for Hollande on the last go-round retreat to the real left, the real left becomes a real threat in the upcoming election.

Not a hint of that in Mr. Waldie's story.

Why? I'm guessing it's because the billionaires who own popular media world-wide would rather not broadcast the fact that there is such a thing as a "real" left.

And Waldie correctly surmises that it's better to tell half the story and keep a full paycheque, than to tell the whole story and have no paycheque.

Hollande gets cold shower in municipal elections

Hollande the Conqueror may be a hero in the CAR and Mali, but he's toxic in France.

The big winners in the municipal elections are allegedly the centre-right main opposition, but read between the lines and it's obvious that the real winners are the once-marginalized National Front.

We've said it before and we'll say it again; once the mainstream left makes itself irrelevant, the fringe right will pick up the pieces.

National Front is long past being on the fringes. The roots of the far right go deep in France. Yes, there is a substantial "silent majority" that will be in denial about that forever, but look at the election results and tell me who is in the ascendancy.

A big part of the reason is that the left cannot seem to come up with viable candidates who capture the imagination of the people. What did Hollande ever have to offer?

Those with even a marginal appreciation for the difference between left and right would have been putting their eggs in the Melenchon basket two years ago.