Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF

“Le Pen, who inherited leadership of the party from her father, has worked to shed the Front’s image as a racist fringe movement and move it more toward the mainstream, even as the French government itself tacks toward the right on immigration. All the same, she seems to be slipping in the polls after several weeks where it looked like she had a good shot at making the second round. It will be interesting to see what other U.S. politicians follow Paul’s lead and take the chance to meet with her. Even if GOP candidates might like her stances of immigration and Islam, they probably won’t see eye-to-eye on economics……….”

American right-wingers get excited about some French rightists, thinking they are of the same ideology of “no regulation, cutting taxes, eliminating the government, giving corporations a free reign”.
Yet the most right-wing French politicians often are to the left of the most liberal Democrat in the United States. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, once touted as a right-winger, is to the left of most Democrats in the US Senate in matters of economic policy, social programs, and especially health care. They are usually anti-immigrant and hostile to their Muslim compatriots, but they have no intention of ever gutting the social programs that the French people have come to enjoy, like retirement and an extensive public health program. In France, as in all of Europe and all industrial countries, health care is considered a human right, as it should be in the US as well. That is why American right-wingers usually keep their distance from their “leftist” French namesakes. That is why this courting will never get anywhere: besides it is unpatriotic and unseemly for a right-wing American Teabagger to be seen hobnobbing with someone with a French accent. It is just a ‘so un-American’ thing to do, possibly even anti-American in some quarters.
Cheers
mhg


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