Category — Politics

I was interested to read in Liberation that Segolene Royal has won the Socialist Party’s endorsement of her policies. In the voting, Royal received 29%, with Aubry and Delanoe following with 25% each, and Hamon with 19%. Bertrand Delanoe, who has the support of Royal’s ex-partner Francois Hollande, is also mayor of Paris.

I’ve always liked Royal, and thought she conducted a reasonable campaign back in 2007. Stylish and assertive, she even wears heels when visiting remote farms! A good debater, she was a match for Sarkozy in their final debate, perhaps too much so, since as Adam Gopnik remarked in his article, ‘this allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he’d never had the chance to play before–a sympathetic, erring, middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.’

[Read more →]

I don’t think I know anyone who is not elated about Obama’s win. A friend and I watched the election results on his i-phone during an all-day meeting in Melbourne today and held our breath until the votes moved beyond the point of no return.

Obama should, however, watch out for anyone phoning with a French accent. The Masked Avengers like calling the newly-elected (as well as the too-idiotic-to-ever-be-elected) and Chirac and Sarkozy have both been pranked. See the clip below, in which Sarkozy takes a call from the ‘Canadian President’…

‘SARAH PALIN piégée par un faux SARKOZY’ screamed Le Monde’s headline. But I’d already listened to the ‘interview’ myself, and read the story online, thanks to the Melbourne Age newspaper. It can also be found on YouTube.

Devised by Canadian comedy duo Les Justiciers Masques (the Masked Avengers), the fake Sarkozy was played by MARC-ANTOINE AUDETTE, with the ‘interview’ aired on a Quebec radio station.

Trust me, SARAH PALIN was completely taken in. How she could be so gullible is beyond belief, especially given the fake SARKOZY’S fluency in English, including his use of idiom (describing his wife as ‘so hot in bed’), and several clues, such as his ‘special adviser to the United States—JOHNNY HALLYDAY’.

When PALIN says at the end ‘Oh, have we been pranked’, there should have been no question mark after ‘pranked’ as inserted in the story in The Age. From my listening, her oral inflection was unmistakably on the ‘have we’, meaning ‘Oh dear, we have really been taken in’.

’Meanwhile, according to the report in The Age, AUDETTE is saying he hopes he won’t be given ‘a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay’.