I don't hate the french people in general. They're individuals and I'm happy to base my like or dislike of them on their individual merrits.
I have very little respect for the French government. They have no moral compass. They are trying to control the EU and use it to beat up on the rest of the world. I don't even have a real problem with that if I argeed with what they did with the influence in the EU and the UN for that matter. However the French have reached a level of moral indifference where they are willing to ignore genocide and horrible human rights violations as long as there is political or economic gain in it for them. They play lip service to sanctions, but they have no will to enforce the sanctions.
The French are just one of many similar countries in the UN. They look at the US as a threat to their power, and are more concerned with not letting the US set the tempo on the world stage than they are about the issues we are trying to deal with.
If you look at why we attacked Iraq, it wasn't just because we felt there was a valid threat to the US. That's just the part the media is concentrating on, because it's the weakest part of the argument, and the media is trying to tear appart the administration regardless of what it costs the country.
We invaded Iraq because they were a threat to all truely free people, as well as those that opposed them in their own country. Husain had millions of his own people tortured and murdered. He attacked other countries. He attacked Israel with missles when it looked like that would gain him support in his region.
He was a ruthless dictator who we'd been forced to go to war against in the past to protect our alies in the region. Years later he was no less ruthless, no less ambitious, and was working on finding ways to build back up his power.
The French are mad because we interferred with another government, and they are concerned that we might some day interfere in their government. They and a large number of people in our country as well insist on concensus building as a way to deal with issues because they know that if they support other countries rights to do as they please within their borders, they won't have to worry about outside interference. They simply don't want to be hald accountable for what they do by others.
History has a strange way of repeating itself. Someday in the future, hopefully the distant future, we're going to lear what the founding fathers of our country learned. If a government isn't held accountable, if they don't have to fear interferrence by those that have the power to force them to change, they will eventually become corrupt and trample on the rights of their citizens.
This is why we have a constitution and bill of rights designed to protect the people from abuses by the government. Because eventually, if our rights keep getting whittled away by misdeeds by the legislative, judicial and executive branches, we will get to the point where revolt is the only way to restore our rights. Our government was designed with checks and ballances to prevent that, but we can all see that those checks and balances don't always work. The weakest part of the system is the Judicial branch where activist judges are ignoring the constitution, or "reinterpreting" it to match how they belive things should be.
Wow, this rant sure took me off topic.
