Paris Calling

Villepin fires... reloads... fires again....

I'm not sure where the man spent his summer vacation, but by the looks of it, it might well have been at an Al Qaedq camp near Kandahar because Dominique de Villepin is one fearless crusader right now.

Last we checked, Villepin was on his way to jail. With prosecutors preparing charges against him in the Clearstream affair, Sarkozy had beat his longtime rival once and for all.

But no. Villepin, this whole time has been writing another book on Napoleon: "The Dark Sun of Power". And since it's "la rentree litteraire" it's time to publicize the damn thing, and Villepin is doing the radio rounds and at each stop he skewers the Sarkozy presidency like the Socialists can only dream of doing.

"I'm worried that the president is surrounded by flatterers," he said on France Inter. "I suggest everyone read and rerread the Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliere," he suggested, (insinuating that the new President is delusional and vulnerable to yes-men - if my third grade memory of the play serves me correctly).

"With no effective opposition in France these days, I'm only doing what Sarkozy always did in the Chirac era," he says. (Ouch!)

Does Villepin know his goose is cooked and whistling his way to oblivion? Whatever the case, bring on the crazy I say.

France: Hairdresser to Saudi Princess Sparks Terror Alert

An amazing story behind the Parisien pay-wall.

Anyone who thinks that the House of Saud and their repressive regime is the real root of terror, well the French Police nearly had your man, or at least his wife.

The wife of Saudi Minister of the Interior (and 'the most powerful man in Saudi Arabia'), Mohamed Nayef ben Abdelaziz al-Saoud, has been living at the Crillon Hotel for the past four months. Like many princesses throughout history, she loves Paris.

She also loves Mercedes cars.

But not diesels..

Unfortunately, a fleet of regular fuel Mercedes aren't available for rent in Paris.

So, her secretary here (the son of weapons dealer Akram Ojjeh), rented five of them in Stuggart through an arab owned Paris company with a business address in one of Paris' notorious suburbs that teams with north-african immigrants.

But the princess has other 'likes'. In addition to regular-fuel Mercedes, the wife of the minister also loves her favorite hairdresser. He's in Beirut.

Needing a 'brushing', the princess had him flown in for a day trip (for five thousand dollars).

Brushing completed, the hair dresser was put in a Mercedes to be driven back to the airport and back to Beirut.

But the hairdresser, so stunned and excited by his express job to Paris, decides to record the occasion for posterity. Sitting in the front seat of the Mercedes (with Stuttgart plates), he takes out a video camera and captures every cherished moment of his ride to the airport.

In the first few meters of this journey, just next do to the Crillion Hotel on Place de la Concorde, is the US embassy.

There, French anti-terroism police see a German plated Mercedes stopped at a red light with two Middle Eastern looking men inside it, one of them videotaping the facade of the US embassy.

The car pulls away, but the police get to work:

Rented car from Stuttgart... to a middleman company... based in 'sensitive' suburb!!

The man-hunt is on... Until the next day, all of France's police is on red alert to trace the Mercedes.

They find it, of course, parked in front of the Crillon. The police set up a stake-out.

The secretary comes out of the hotel and he's quickly apprehended. The man has a 5,000 euro in cash on him, for the Princesses' last minute expenses, he tells the police, quickly clearing up the whole affair.

France: Immigration Police Target Soup Kitchens

Link: LEXPRESS.fr - Illegal Immigrants: a roundup of "people who are hungry" - L'Express.

It looks like that the Paris police took advantage of a regular soup kitchen on the Place de la Republique , hosted through the winter by the very much loved 'Restos du Coeur', to set up a impromptu roundup of illegal immigrants.

According to Police sources quoted in Le Parisen, the operation is routine; officers are trying to effectively reach thier quotas ordered from the local prosecutor (who answers to Sarkozy).

In 2006, 3,365 foreigners were expelled, 15 percent more than 2005.

The roundups, wether the soup kitchen was an intended target or not, use racial profiling. If you are one of the 7 to 10 million French citizens of color you will most likely get controlled.

I, a white American who doesn't necessarily have my papers in order, will not.

And if you are from Romania, you'd better shave, and when possible, buy a new set of clothes. In other words, pass as a white French person.

France: Is Segolene Running as a Mother?

The New York Times argues that Hillary Clinton and Speaker Pelosi are turning up the Mom factor in their respective public personas. Like many people have observed about Segolene, femininity and being a mother has lately seemed to offer more good than bad to political women. And if Segolene gets through last week's nightmare, being a woman in 2007 (but maybe its just being Segolene?), definitely has its privileges.

Segolene/Sarkozy: A Bloody Stalemate Thus Far

There's a little less than 90 days to go and already, the two main candidates have been successfully branded exactly as they hoped they never would be.

Segolene, having tried to progressively dip her toe into intense campaigning by slowly building her victorious push, has only succeeded in coming off as a moron and Sarkozy, after pedantically claiming he had "changed", has already been successfully branded as the power hungry, repressive bully all his handlers say he can no longer be seen as if he wants to win this damn thing. The score between them is definitely a tie at this point, but both have been bloodied badly.

So if there was ever a vacuum for the "third man", this is it. Le Monde, very hopefully, is advancing that it's Bayrou (photo), the dogged, but vanilla, centrist, while any café waiter will tell you its Le Pen.

Sego is in the French West Indies (where she partly grew up) and the Parisian conventional wisdom is that she needs the change of scenery. Last week saw a dizzying series of mishaps, the latest being her falling for a (right-wing) comedian who passed himself off as the Prime Minster of Quebec.

Sego not only fell for the imitation, but cracked a joke that the French would hardly be sorry to see Corsica go. Which is probably true, but you get sent to Napoleonic hell for saying such a thing and her joke's has been broadcast for the whole nation to hear.

For his part, Sarkozy has spent the better part of the week denying a newspaper claim that he had ordered France's General Intelligence department (the RG) to investigate a new Sego adviser who had previously worked for Greenpeace.

Sarko has denied making the order (they just did it he says), but the RG are his as long as he remains Ministry of Interior, a post he refuses to let go before he's confident that Chirac has cleared himself out of the way (-- this is all so complicated!).

It's hard to know what will happen next. With the main candidates already tarred and feathered with all this time to go, it's all going to be strange and unforeseen from now on, at least that much is certain.

France: Laurent Bazin, Political Journalist, Closes Blog in a Hurry

Political journalist and news talk show host Laurent Bazin started a blog in late 2006 with the stated intention of writing what often gets unsaid in mainstream French political journalism.

Within days, he started a media storm when he recounted an "off the record" lunch hosted by right wing presidential candidate and Ministry of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy hosted a whole series of these lunches with all the major news organizations, all of which played along with keeping matters confidential, which French journalists typically do.

When word got out about Bazin's blog entry, Bazin's employer, the major media company Canal Plus, immediately ordered the journalist to remove the blog entry in question, which he did, though it can still be found if you Google around the French web.

Now, six or so weeks later, Bazin has very suddenly closed his blog, citing the pain he was causing his employers and journalistic colleagues. His frankness, he writes, was causing too much heartache (and heartburn probably). The move is very blunt and there is undoubtedly a whole lot of story behind it.

It also goes a long way to illustrate just how conventional and conservative the mainstream news media still is in France. The idea that the established, entrenched news journalists (who have "earned their stripes") not monopolize the political message -I mean news- to the masses is unsettling for them to the core. Bazin, who I think is more Woodward than Bernstein, clearly couldn't handle the Parisian cold shoulders.

It will be interesting to see if anyone in the mainstream press picks up on the story. For the record, Bazin's last news entry was "off the record" word that the Segolene's team were going to set up a rapid response unit to counter the big (yet covert) guns the rightist UMP have been pointing at Segolene of late, a scoop that was published in Le Monde a half day later.

France/Quebec: Segolene Declares War on Canada

Segolene's off the cuff remarks on Quebecois sovereignty yesterday are stupendous (read the Le Monde article with a video link to the quip here).

There's no surer way to generate columns of bad press than encouraging along Quebecois separatism. The mainstream press in Canada will have you for lunch, which is exactly what they are doing, to the delight of the press corps here in France.

I don't think that Sego or any of the French political scene has quite absorbed the power of Youtube.com yet (or dailymotion.com, the French copycat). "Off the record" just isn't what it used to be, people, which this Washington Post article carefully delineates here.

(And though no one seems to feel particularly impassioned about her, Hillary Clinton's greatest and widely acknowledged strength is her steely self-discipline. She made an on-mike mistake way back in 1991 -the famous "I'm not going to 'stand by my man' and bake cookies" moment on 60 Minutes- and to my mind has never made one since.)

There is one positive thing Segolene can take from her foreign policy gaffe (and to some, the latest of many): Sarkozy can hardly take her to task. Until France has forgotten his Bush-love famously captured in a photograph, foreign policy will remain a dangerous territory for the UMP leader. The Socialists still have him pinned down on that one, but for how long?

And also, whenever Segolene makes a mistake, she always errs to the right. Supporting Quebec against Anglo-Saxon hegemony is as Gaullist as you get. Her remarks are certainly a gaffe, but there also a challenge to Sarkozy's Gaullist credentials.

But that's all making the best of things. Segolene's gaffe is pretty bad.

Hillary Clinton is No Segolene, She's MAM!

It would be tempting to immediately compare Hillary's launch into the presidential race to Segolene's campaign in France. But the facile "she's a woman" comparison needs to be a little more nuanced.

If Hillary is comparable to anyone in the French political scene, it's far more Michelle Alliot Marie (MAM for short), France's Minister of Defense, and a close ally to Jacques Chirac, than anyone else.

MAM has very much embraced a militarist persona, including during those few weeks that she was vaguely considered a candidate alternative to Nicolas Sarkozy on the right.

In public appearances, she is incredibly martial in her demeanor. Her pant-suits often vaguely resemble uniforms and her plush and seemingly endless pashmina scarves give her a legionnaire flair. You can't help thinking that she's vaguely dressed in drag.

Hillary, thank god, hasn't put on epaulettes, but she has diligently built herself a militarist aura during her six years of public office (as New York's Junior Senator). She flies to Afghanistan and Iraq on a somewhat regular basis (more than President Bush does), and prizes her seat on the Armed Services Committee, the Senate's military oversight body.

Like a born again Margaret Thatcher, her image building tactic is to out militarize the militarists (a strategy that some Democrats argue is outdated by two years: Americans aren't hawks anymore).

As far as "being a woman" is concerned, Segolene is a far more ambitious proposition because unlike Hilary, MAM, or Thatcher, Sego is presenting herself as a post-militarist politician, a woman's woman. There isn't a sniff about being the chief of the armed forces on her political platform thus far (though, as any Parisian will clamor to tell you, there's not a whole hell of a lot on that platform). And Segolene quite conspicuously eschews "dressing in drag" as the other fore-mentioned office holders so obviously do (to varying degrees).

And even today, that's one hell of a gamble. Segolene pays the price every day for not putting on the pant-suit. It's not so much that she's attacked for being a woman, but more for not acting like a militarist man, for not over-compensating (click here to see photos that perhaps begin to tell why she refuses to do so). And that's an accomplishment even successful American women have yet to convincingly come up with, pace Grandma Pelosi.

French Election A Train Wreck Already

That didn't take long. Three days after the inauguration of Sarkozy as the right-wing candidate, the press corps is hailing the implosion of the Segolene Royal campaign.

And the supposed reason for this implosion comes down to the power couple, Segolene and her companion, socialist party boss Francois Hollande. Why are there messages so seemingly in discordance, the wags ask. Where is the message discipline, as the Americans like to say?

The reason for the media static, it seems to me, is the very much the weekend's show of strength that is Sarkozy. Political reporters everywhere are always most impressed by demonstrations of strength. Though they always claim to be on the dogged hunt for messages and depth, their real manna is effective authoritarianism on behalf of a campaign and its candidate. The more closed off and air-tight the headquarters, the higher the praises.

This is something that the Bush campaign of 2004 learned very well. Bloggers and journalists could complain to high heaven that Karl Rove's great push forward was worthy of a 1930s Munich, but the fact was that it worked. In the moment, human beings tend to choose power over intelligence, even though they try to come back on the decision later (see the US election of 2006).

And right now, the press corps is very much in the power trip created by Sarkozy last Sunday in his 4 million euro campaign kick-off.

But added to that power imbalance, is all the other things too true about Segolene: That she is not only a woman, but a woman who claims her independence from the power currents that rule the Paris elite. She has coldly declared herself independent from the power habits that the Paris glitterati feed on, and since she isn't paying their dinner tab, their responding in kind by leaking like sieves to the press who are for now deeply enamored with the Sarkozy show of force.

And the leaks, two times out of three, are stabs at the power couple (in perfectly Clintonian or Blairian fashion). The elites are trying to dismantle Segolene by picking apart her (quasi) marriage. [A top aid of hers, Arnaud Montebourg, tried to help but ended up botching a joke about the couple on TV last night, and has been suspended by Sego for his trouble.]

A survey seems to say that Segolene is losing ground for all this, though it can just as easily be attributed to an unavoidable Sarkozy bump from his over-the-top coronation last week.

But whether on the right, the left, up or down, the whole damn election for now seems like a train wreck,. No one, no matter of what political function or persuasion, has a damn clue where this campaign is heading or what issue is going to drive the whole freak-show to the finish line.

Maybe today the Sarko-show seems to float barely on top of the confusion, but who knows exactly how long that will last. Message discipline from the right is about as reliable in the long run as it is on the left, i.e., not at all.

UK to Meles: Prove Presence of British Jihadis

Stop the presses. Meles may have lied about a thing or two.