The right-wing noise machine is all in a huff because the President sent a letter to the French president, and addressed the letter to Chirac instead of Sarozy because he's dumb and stuff.
I know that Erick Erickson is very rarely wrong, but check this out:
Obama Hacks Off France In Latest Foreign Policy Blunder
Someone forgot to tell Barack Obama that Jacque Chirac is no longer the President of France.
Erickson's post brings comments like:
Compare and contrast as usual
bk Sunday, March 22nd at 9:31PM EDT (link)
I use that comment title a lot... Bush got blind-sided by a reporter asking him to name some leaders in other countries, some of them pretty obscure. Bush was supposedly a moron for now knowing them all.
But here Obama prepares a letter to the wrong person in France for God’s sake. This is 100x worse — no, make it at least 1,000x or more worse — than what Bush was ridiculed for by the left.
If this guy were not the The One Doc Holliday Sunday, March 22nd at 9:34PM EDT (link)
he would have been impeached by now. He is unfit for office.
Molon Labe!
Oh, and I guess this would be as good a time as any
mbecker908 Sunday, March 22nd at 9:38PM EDT (link) to ask if all of Obama’s staffers - along with him - are Special Olympians.
Entirely logical
jimmuy8 Sunday, March 22nd at 11:08PM EDT (link)
As I look at lefty sites, the one thing that keeps striking me is not that they are ignorant or stupid–it’s that they willfully insulate themselves from anything that opposes or contradicts their view.
and this comment, way down at the bottom:
Before you go any further with this...
nod90 Sunday, March 22nd at 11:19PM EDT (link)
...you need a good French to English translation of the original article from Le Figaro. I ran it through Google Translate (I’m not claiming this is a good translation) and this is what I got:
Barack Obama wrote to Jacques Chirac
The U.S. President has just sent a letter "very sympathetic" to Jacques Chirac, in the words of the latter. "I am confident that we can over the next four years working together in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world," writes the successor to George W. Bush’s predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. In mentioning the word "peace," Obama makes implicit tribute to the action of the former French president who opposed the war in Iraq. A U.S. intervention against which the future U.S. president had opposed as a senator, in a vote in Congress.
Some of the comments on the article say that Obama sent the letter to the Chirac Foundation as a reply to a letter that he recieved from them. For example:
Two birds with one stone?
21/03/2009 at 16:08
In writing to the Foundation Chirac, Obama may have had two objectives in mind: to allow the future by keeping open the option to use the services of the former president, who, like himself, had opposed the war in Iraq, .........
Apologies to Erick if you have already checked this out, but I just want to be sure that Redstate isn’t getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Erickson links to Ace of Spades and Gateway Pundit, who links to Free Republic, along with other wing-nut sites. Real Americans all, so of course none of them can translate the French, or spend a minute trying to figure out what is says. I looked and found no news of this story outside of the right wing blogs. I suspect this would be a larger story were it true, liberal media and all.
The French article from Le Figaro, which I can't read, is here: Confidentiel : Barack Obama a écrit à Jacques Chirac
Can we point and laugh?