Remember how Republicans used to malign France and "Old Europe"? Everything from France's health care system - one of the most cost efficient in the world - to liberal ideas to the decline of religiosity was open to attack and parody. Now, a vast case of amnesia has seemingly set in as Republicans attack Obama for not attending the weekend march in Paris or at least not sending a high ranking American as a representative. Perhaps it was a mistake, or maybe it was better not to give Islamic terrorists a chance to say America orchestrated the whole thing. That's something open to debate. What's not open to debate is the hypocrisy of suddenly French loving Republicans. A column in the Washington Post takes deserved note of the hypocrisy overload. Here are highlights:
There is a certain je ne sais quoi in conservatives’ criticism of the Obama administration over last week’s terrorist attack in France.A decade ago, Republicans in Congress were renaming French fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast” because of that country’s refusal to support the Iraq war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld belittled the “old Europe” French, President George W. Bush mocked an American reporter for speaking French to the French president, and conservative critics called the French “weasels,” “appeasers” and worse. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was ridiculed by the Bush administration for being “too French” and looking French, and his fluency in French was a liability in the campaign.
And now, that very same Monsieur Kerry, the secretary of state, and his boss, President Obama, are being condemned by conservatives for . . . not being nice enough to the French.
Quelle horreur!
The cause célèbre this time is the failure of the Obama administration to send anybody of higher rank than the U.S. ambassador to attend Sunday’s march in Paris showing solidarity against the terrorists.
“Our president should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies,” proclaimed Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican agent provocateur from Texas.
Fox News’s Greta van Susteren said the absence was “embarrassing” and that “Obama should not have snubbed Paris.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — like Cruz a would-be presidential contender — declared it “a mistake not to send someone.” (For the record, neither Cruz nor Rubio attended the march.)
Largely absent from this condemnation of the American government’s slight of the French were the French themselves. French President François Hollande said Obama had been “very present” in the response to last week’s attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish market.
Officials I spoke to said it was a simple screw-up: They didn’t understand how significant the event would be, with leaders of some 40 countries in attendance.
But the notion that Kerry, of all people, was slighting the French is a bit incroyable. The son of a diplomat, Kerry has close family in France and learned the language at a Swiss boarding school. After the initial massacre in Paris last week, he addressed the shooting at an appearance with the Polish foreign minister, in both English and in French. French TV channel TF1 said that Kerry’s “poignant statement in French” would “go down in history.”
Not too long ago, Kerry’s Francophilia earned him ridicule. Tom DeLay, a House Republican leader, would greet crowds by saying, “Hi. Or, as John Kerry would say, ‘Bonjour.’ ”
But now Kerry is being called insufficiently pro-French . . . The conservatives are guilty of a bit of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in criticizing the Obama administration for snubbing a people they not long ago called cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
