Le Figaro fait pas son boulot

Il est déprimant de lire le Figaro et de constater qu'ils recrutent des journalistes qui sont le reflet non des idées de leurs lecteurs mais de celle de la tranche d'âge et de revenus qui est la leur.

En outre, comme ils recrutent désormais principalement des collaborateurs issus des écoles de journalisme, ils héritent de rédacteurs aussi incultes que la majorité des jeunes de leur âge.

Ainsi, le compte rendu que le Figaro fait des projets de réforme du système de santé américain s'attarde sur les manifestations de mécontentement mais n'explique jamais les raisons de la révolte d'une partie de la population américaine.

De la même manière que leur calamiteuse correspondante à Madrid ne lit que la presse de gauche pour s'informer, les correspondants aux Etats-Unis semblent n'écouter qu'un seul son cloche.

Pourtant, il suffit de fouiller un peu pour trouver les raisons. Elles sont simples comme le jour et claires comme de l'eau de roche. Mais voilà, il n'est pas très « politiquement correct » de le dire.

En effet, comment expliquer au bon bourgeois français au conformisme de béton armé que la principale raison du refus du système commun de santé est lié à la division raciale du pays ?

Les sociologues, comme Robert D. Putnam, ont mis en lumière que la cohésion d'une communauté est inversement proportionnelle à sa diversité raciale et ethnique. En d'autres termes, et en caricaturant un peu, on accepte de contribuer au financement de la santé de son voisin s'il a la même couleur de peau que soi. Voir l'étude ici et des commentaires là.

Les nullissimes rédacteurs du Figaro ont une excuse pour ne pas connaître les travaux d'un des plus grands sociologues américains d'aujourd'hui : il n'a jamais été traduit en français !

En revanche, cette excuse ne tient pas pour les correspondants de ce que fut un grand quotidien.

Voici l'analyse du polémiste conservateur américain Pat Buchanan. On peut ne pas partager ses points de vue, mais les faits sont têtus :

Angry White Men

To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount.

But is it wise for the White House to denigrate and insult scores of thousands with the fire and energy to come to town meetings in August, and who appear to represent millions? Is this depiction fair or accurate?

Most K Street lobbyists could not organize a two-car funeral. They don’t storm meetings. They buy friends with $1,000 checks. And if GOP operatives are turning out these crowds, why could they not turn them out for John McCain, unless Sister Sarah showed up?

The Obamaites had best wake up. Opposition to health-care reform is surging, and Barack Obama’s campaigning has gone hand-in-hand with collapsing support, just as George W. Bush’s barnstorming did for Social Security reform.

There is an anger out there unseen since Ross Perot was leading Bush I and Bill Clinton in the presidential trial heats in 1992.

Who are these folks? Why are they angry?

In his essay “Decline of the American Male” in USA Today, David Zinczenko, editor of Men’s Health, give us a clue. “Of the 5.2 million people who’ve lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have jobs than men.”

Ed Rubenstein, who has written for Forbes, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, blogs on VDARE.com that if one uses the household survey of job losses for June-July, Hispanics gained 150,000 positions, while non-Hispanics lost 679,000. Guess who got the stimulus jobs.

Going back to the beginning of the Bush presidency, Rubenstein says that “for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 122.5. … (But) for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 98.9.”

Since 2001, Hispanic employment has increased by 3,627,000 positions, while non-Hispanic positions have fallen by 1,362,000. For black and white America, the Bush decade did not begin well or end well, and it has gotten worse under Obama.

African-Americans remain loyal, but among white folks, where Obama ran stronger than John Kerry or Al Gore, he is hemorrhaging.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, which showed him falling to 50 percent approval, whites, by 54 percent to 27 percent, felt Obama behaved “stupidly” in the Sgt. Crowley-professor Gates dustup.

Fifteen straight months of job losses by non-Hispanics explains the anger, but columnist Lowell Ponte raises an issue that may explain who is protesting health-care reform and why.

Under the civil rights legal doctrine of disparate impact, used in the New Haven firefighters case, if tests for hirings and promotions consistently produce results disadvantageous to minorities, the tests are, de facto, suspect as inherently discriminatory, and the results are tossed out. New Haven canceled the promotions for firefighters when all but one of the firemen who passed the test were white, and not a single African-American made the cut.

The city argued that New Haven was acting true to the letter of the Civil Rights Act, which says that tests that consistently produce a disparate and unfavorable impact on African-Americans must go.

Ponte applies the disparate impact doctrine to the trillion-dollar health-care reform.

Who are the principal beneficiaries? The 47 million uninsured who will be covered. Who are the principal losers? The elderly sick who, in the name of controlling costs, are going to lose benefits, be denied care at the end of their lives and have their lives shortened. For half of all health-care costs are in the last six months of life, and cost control is priority No. 1.

Here is where the disparate impact hits. Among those who benefit most — the uninsured — African-Americans, Hispanics and immigrants are overrepresented. Among the biggest losers — seniors and the elderly sick — well over 80 percent are white. Ponte quotes Fox News’ Dick Morris:

“The principal impact of the Obama health-care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.”

Under Obamacare, adds Morris, “the elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.”

America is already divided ideologically and politically on health-care reform. And with seniors having to sacrifice care, while the young are all insured, a generational divide is opening.

Now Nobel prize-winner and New York Times pundit Paul Krugman writes in his “The Town Hall Mobs” column that, as did Richard Nixon’s men, “cynical political operators are … appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.”

Pulitzer prize-winning black columnist Cynthia Tucker says 45 percent to 65 percent of all vocal opponents of Obamacare are motivated by racial hostility to a black president.

We are headed for interesting times.

Des pensées hérétiques

Dans les colonnes du Daily Mail, l'écrivain et journaliste Peter Hitchens rend compte de la parution de deux ouvrages aux Etats-Unis qui remettent en cause les idées reçues sur la seconde Guerre mondiale.

Il est fort douteux qu'aucun des deux ne soit traduit et publié un jour en français et encore moins en allemand.

Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens
It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.
Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.

Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases.

What do you think? Tell in the comments section at the bottom of the page

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Heroism: Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944

With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor.

I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours.

I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the throat.

This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set.

So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me.

When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.

I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.

They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.

And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.

They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.

Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."

And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.

When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.

Now here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry.

I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.


Same story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict justified on the precedent of the Second World War

They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.

We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.

Well, I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't.

Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question.

The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong.

In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?

What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?

Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.

The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"

The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"

Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.

The two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.

I know Pat Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for "America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the Second World War.

As for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his phone-sex novel, Vox, was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky.

Human Smoke is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times.

Baker is a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with large navies.

He has selected with care to suit his position, but many of the facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view.


In his element: Churchill preferred war to peace. claims U.S. author Patrick Buchanan
Here is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, allegedly railing against the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry.

I say "allegedly" because I have not seen the original. I also say it because I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another Baker snippet which suggests that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University.

Such things today would end a political career in an instant.

Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief.

If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.

Its outbreak halted the "Kindertransport" trains rescuing Jewish children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it.

Baker is also keen to show that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder.

The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing.

A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane.

Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace.

As the First World War began in 1914, two observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man".

Churchill also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars.

It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against.

Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did.

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions.

The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.


Blood brothers: By Christmas 1940, Stalin (right) had murdered many more people than Hitler, and had invaded nearly as many countries

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.

We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war.

This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

Worse still is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war.

I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes.

That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: "Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations."

He then even more wetly urged "Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right.

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it.

The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.

We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.

As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.

Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels?

Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire?

The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out.

He was very narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead?

But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned.

Can it be true that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours.

Of course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself.

By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries.

We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain.

And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.

Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense.

No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved.

But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

• Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is published on May 13 by Crown Publishing.

Défendre Boeing à tout prix

Tout est bon pour défendre Boeing, y compris le mensonge.

Le polémiste conservateur américain Patrick Buchanan, un des meilleurs défenseurs du républicanisme traditionnel aux Etats-Unis, a publié sur son blog un article sur la situation économique de son pays dans lequel il consacre quelques paragraphes au choix par l'US Air Force de l'avion ravitailleur proposé par Northtrop, développé à partir d'une cellule d'Airbus A-330. Les arguments qu'utilise le polémiste son mensongers et reflètent les contradictions et le désarroi d'une puissante nation confrontée aux dures réalités du déclin (relatif) de sa position de dominance industrielle. Pour lire l'article en entier, cliquer ici.
Nous avons reproduit les paragraphes ci-après en les faisant suivre d'un commentaire.

“The commonest error in politics,” said Lord Salisbury,
“is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

Lord Salisbury’s rule comes to mind on reading of John McCain’s delight at the $40 billion contract awarded the French-led parent of Airbus — to build the next generation of U.S. Air Force tankers.

Le truc habituel des xénophobes étatsuniens est d'accoler le terme de France ou de français à tout ce qu'ils n'aiment pas. Il ignore le fait qu'il s'agit désormais d'une compagnie dont le siège est aux Pays-Bas et dont la France n'est qu'une composante, au même titre que l'Allemagne, le Royaume-Uni ou l'Espagne.
Buchanan cache le fait que le contrat n'a pas été remporté par EADS, mais par Northrop, une entreprise 100% américaine qui est chargée de transformer une cellule d'A330 en avion militaire. Lire ici un entretien avec Ron Sugar, le patron de Northrop.

The contract could run to $100 billion and is a body blow to Boeing in its duel to the death with Airbus. Two-thirds of all air-to-air refueling tankers are used by the United States. The contract gives a 30-year lease on life to the expiring Airbus A330 and means early death for Boeing’s 767, the U.S. model for the tanker.

Contrairement à ce qu'affirme Buchanan, l'A330 mis en service en 1992 est loin d'être en fin de vie, bien au contraire. La famille des A330-340 et 350 a recueilli 1654 commandes dont 874 ont été livrées. C'est au contraire le B767 qui a épuisé son potentiel. Lancé en 1978 (premier vol en 1981), cet avion américain s'est vendu à 1011 exemplaires dont les derniers sont en cours de livraison. Ce qui a mis un terme à la production du B767 c'est le manque d'intérêt pour cet avion de la part des compagnies aériennes. Quant au contrat, le montant réel adjugé est de 30 milliards de dollars et non pas de 100 milliards.

Congratulating himself for having exposed corruption in the Boeing bid, McCain purred, “I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition.”

If McCain thinks Airbus has prospered through “fair and open competition,” he is beyond recall. In its first 25 years, Airbus sold 770 planes but did not make a dime in profit. It was started as a socialist cartel, subsidized by the governments of Spain, France, Britain and Germany, to invade and capture a market owned by Americans who built the planes that won World War II.

Les Européens ont investi pour rattraper le retard pris par le continent à la suite de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. C'est à cette occasion que le gouvernement américain a largement subventionné son industrie aéronautique. Ensuite, au cours de la guerre froide, des sommes colossales ont été dépensées pour renforcer l'US Air Force et Boeing a été un des principaux bénéficiaires. Le premier long-courrier américain, le B707 est directement issu du programme de ravitailleurs en vol KC135.