Grandiloquent Liar

Yesterday, Sunday March 11, 2007, Jacques Chirac delivered his farewell speech to the French people.

It is published (in French) in its entirety at La Tribune.

The ponderous cliché-ridden discourse is mercifully short. In it he says that he would have liked to do more to shake up conservative habits and egos, but that he is proud of what he accomplished.

The French patriots are breathing a sigh of relief that he didn't do more, although he nearly managed to destroy his nation and his people.

Of all the critiques I've read today, and they are all damning, this one by Catholic writer Bernard Antony is the most devastating.

Antony, a devout Catholic with close ties to the Church, is founder of Chrétienté Solidarité (Christian Solidarity) and publisher of the journal Reconquête (Reconquista):

With his grandiloquent solemnity in the utterance of Masonic remarks that
might have been made by a sub-prefect during the Third Republic, Jacques Chirac, true to himself in
his constant and perfected mediocrity, offered no surprises. He was still
faithful to his great capacity for lying without the slightest shame, and with
the most accomplished disdain for any intelligent being that may remain among
those Frenchmen impermeable to the media's hammering.

If ever there was a man who abetted and collaborated all his life with the worst extremisms, with the worst racisms, it is he, Jacques Chirac, who in half a century of political life never made one single gesture for the victims of communism and its hundred
million dead, and its thousands of individuals from all nations who suffered enslaved in its empire since 1917.

For in truth, communism had already exterminated long before Nazism, following its example, began its exterminations.

It continued to exterminate in our own time in the Cambodian genocide, and it continues in China, Indochina and Cuba, to oppress and persecute.
Abortionist-in-chief, Jacques Chirac, by promulgating the Veil Law had only one hatred:

that of the Christian roots of France and the values of the authentic culture of life;

he never uttered one word evoking the endless atrocities committed by the Marxist-Leninist regimes.

And so he was the accomplice of the worst and the longest-lasting extremism that the earth has ever known.

To such a degree that even the astounding anti-Semitism of Marx and Stalin were not denounced by this professional hunter of anti-Semites.

Nor did this would-be cowherd denounce the Marxist hatred of peasants that sent to their
deaths 10 million Russian and Ukrainian peasants.
Jacques Chirac, the grandiloquent, was never politically or morally great. But in the art of lying, he was not mediocre: he was superb

Also:

LIMITED LEGACY FOR 'LE BULLDOZER' FRENCH PRESIDENT

PARIS March 12, 2007 (FT)

- Few politicians can pat a cow’s hindquarters with anything resembling the pleasure of Jacques Chirac. ... As for his legacy, most analysts agree that Chiraquisme, apart from supporting farmers, does not stand for much. ...

Franz-Olivier Giesbert, in his best-selling book The Tragedy of the President, said:

"There is a Chirac curse. A sort of incapacity to govern that leads him sooner or later to put the country against him."

... As Dominique Strauss Kahn, the former Socialist finance minister who served in Mr Chirac's first term, said:

"Chirac has more qualities to conquer power than to exercise it." ... What stands out - for his detractors - from Mr Chirac's record is a sense of wasted opportunities.

FRANCE DESERVED MORE

March 12, 2007 (Telegraph) - Convention demands that we say nice things about people when they retire but, in the case of Jacques Chirac, it is not easy. ...as a politician, he embodied and benefited from much that is wrong with French politics. ... He is charming, inconstant, imposing, dashing and shameless. ... In 2002, when he faced Jean-Marie Le Pen in the presidential run-off, voters went to the polls with banners proclaiming "Better sleaze than hatred", and "Rather the shyster than the fascist". Mr Chirac won 82 per cent of the vote. ... It is said that, in a democracy, people get the politicians they deserve. France deserved better.

FAINT PRAISE AND CANDID CRITICISM OF CHIRAC

PARIS March 12, 2007 (AFP) - European newspapers on Monday offered at best qualified praise and also sharp criticism for French President Jacques Chirac, a day after he announced he would not be running for a third term.

· Berliner Zeitung: What did this man do with the chances he had? Very little. ... [Jack leaves politics with France] in the state it was in when he came to power in 1995.

· Frankfurter Rundschau: [Jack left behind a France] searching for its identity.

· Der Speigel: Not much will remain of the legacy of Chirac, who over 40 years helped to shape French politics.

· Le Soir (Belgium): [A] political weathervane, a feeble strategist but an excellent demagogue.

· Der Standard (Austria): [Withholding support for Sarko, shows Jack] only thought about himself. Maybe his succession doesn't matter to him ... For that reason too, he can hardly expect applause as he steps down.