Jacques-ass
Reluctant as he is to wade into the fever swamps of Euro-politics, Dr. Potomac would like to offer a quick reflection on today's overwhelming rejection by the French public of the proposed European constitution. A salutary development, no doubt, but how to explain it?

Dr. Potomac hasn't seen the internals on the French exit polls but he'd be wiling to bet a half year of his salary in euros that those polls will not reveal that the French were suddenly seized by the threat the proposed European constitution poses to individual liberty and free enterprise. Occam's razor suggests that one should look for the simplest, most direct, and since we are talking of the French, the most irrational explanation. Bear in mind, treasured readers (all three of you), this is the same country that in the depths of the Cold War took its army and its nuclear weapons out of NATO, depriving the alliance of critical strategic depth in the event the Red Army plunged across the Central European plain, on the grounds that France (the same France that Nazi Germany sucker-punched into oblivion) could go it alone in defending itself against the Soviet threat. The French may engage in dangerous liaisons but they don't do alliances in the sense of cooperating seriously with anyone. For shear pig-headedness, no one can out do the French.

This has the sting like the dickens for Monsiour le President. He, after all, has spent the last several years building up in the French mind the notion of a French-led Europe as counter-weight to the American hyperpower; la gloire de France, ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin with his painting of Napoleon on the office wall and all that daft stuff. Suddenly Chirac's imperial pretentions have turned to bite him in the derrier: the French public, made to believe that France is the savior of the Western world is now reluctant to see itself as just one of 29 countries in a European union subject to, say, the wishes of the Latvians. Quelle surprise! This must surely be the Night of the Long Faces in Paris as the leaders of all the major political parties contemplate how much has been lost: a central European bureacracy (cushy jobs with expansive, unenumerated powers and a constitutional license to meddle endlessly in the lives of 400 million people) that large countries like France and Germany really could dominate. All of that gone with single Gallic, "Non!" One can almost hear the word proceeding from the nose of DeGaulle himself.