France Playing Footsie With This Nazi Lady Because 'Neoliberals' Or Something. Hooray!

This is nothing like the American elections of the recent past. Which, by the way, we are totally not relitigating constantly on all our social media channels because we have absolutely not determined that when fighting fascism, what really matters is how much the people who would also like to fight fascism, when it comes to it, felt about the person you think should have won the primaries that happened nearly a year ago now! We are Americans. We of course have united against all of the evil we have been confronted with, because our priorities are awesome and perfect and anyway everyone knows that in the primaries the best candidate was clearly Vermin Supreme. Or possibly Joe Exotic. Frankly, we should have gone with both, because Supreme/Exotic is the next logical step after Trump. Exotic/Supreme might feel just a titch Italian for a truly American ticket.

So in France, there's this pretty firebrandy and weirdly anti-Semitic leftist guy called Jean-Luc Mélenchon . He's running fairly high in the polls, and nobody expects him to win but he's becoming weirdly popular. He is known to be good TV. Now, I am sometimes known to be good TV but this is largely when a producer has plied me with whiskey and then asked if I'd mind going back on camera when we got talking politics. To be good TV sober, you have to say some things that most people would only say in public when they are quite drunk, is the point, which is probably how this guy wound up saying the following:

“In 2008 we both had a membership card for the Socialist Party,” he went on, referring to Macron . “I turned my card in to defend my ideas. He turned his card in to join the Rothschild bank. That’s about as much as you need to know.”

Anyway, he's better than Le Pen which is a sad fucking state of affairs, and anyway he might help her win! Here's how THAT bit of fuckery works: A huge chunk of his supporters are saying that they will vote for neither of the frontrunners if they can't vote Mélenchon first. They are taking their delightful picnic baskets full of nice French things and going home.

Now. We assume you are all experts in French politics but here's the basic state of affairs now: You've got this lady Marine Le Pen, who is calling immigration " delirium " and generally running around screaming France First, or whatever they say in France when they are lying nationalists trying to get votes from people who stand to personally profit or can be convinced to fear immigrants. Le Pen is basically Cruella De Ville without the pretending to not be a racist thing. There's this guy Emmanuel Macron , who's a business-friendly former Socialist, which sounds weird but okay French people, and there's a more right-wing guy too, and they were supposed to be The Candidates. A bunch of other people would be on the ballot too, but not, like, REAL people with chances or anything. Anyway now there's this new guy and he's a left-wing anticapitalist who likes Russia and is kinda skeptical of the EU and NATO both. And he's building up a huge and rabid following. And he might spoil the election towards Le Pen due to the vagaries of the French electoral system, because now half of French youngs are sniffing they will "abstain" from any runoff election that does not include him, LIKE THEY HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN THE REST OF THE WORLD LATELY.

So all of politics is a sphere, not a spectrum, and strange bedfellows is an aphorism for a reason, and this DOES NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH AMERICA which is why we made their politicians the American version. We know more than about 20 seconds focused elsewhere is painful because you, dear readers, are the Real Americans.

[ Politico / Politico / CNN / Wikipedia ]

If you don't want your writers to have to moonlight as fortunetellers and beach psychics, pay the lady!