Take a look at this sorry procession of headlines:

Sunday August 29, 2004: Two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq

Monday August 30, 2004: Paris panic after journalists kidnapped in Iraq

Tuesday August, 31 2004: Hostages plead: Lift headscarf ban

Friday September 3, 2004: Hopes rise for French hostages

Friday September 3, 2004: French FM awaits liberation of hostages in Jordan

Friday September 3, 2004: French hostages 'no longer held'

Saturday September 4, 2004: Hopes rise sharply for quick release of French hostages

Saturday September 4, 2004: French journalists 'about to be freed'

Sunday September 5, 2004: Hostages' release stalls

Monday September 6, 2004: France sounds note of caution over hostages

Monday September 6, 2004: France Hopes Stance Aids Captives in Iraq

Thursday September 9, 2004: France wants U.S. out of hostage crisis

Friday September 10, 2004: Liberation of French hostages still possible: French FM

Monday September 13, 2004: French try to answer Iraq's anarchy with charm

Monday September 13, 2004: Paris fears long wait possible for hostages

Tuesday September 14, 2004: Journalists' Iraqi captors say France is "enemy of Muslims"

Friday September 17, 2004: If Chirac can't deliver on hostages, who can?

Monday September 20, 2004: De Villepin optimistic for release of Iraq hostages

Tuesday September 21, 2004: Chirac in fresh appeal for kidnapped journalists

Tuesday September 28, 2004: Report: French Hostages in Iraq to Be Freed Soon

Wednesday September 29, 2004: Group holding Iraq hostages pays ‘tribute’ to French stand on Iraq

Friday October 1, 2004: Uncertain negotiations: Confusion surrounds efforts to secure the release of the French journalists and their Syrian driver

Sunday October 3, 2004: Chaos grips bid to free hostages held in Iraq

Monday October 4, 2004: France Riled by Failed Iraq Rescue Mission

Monday October 4, 2004: France Calls Crisis Talks Over Iraq Hostages Farce

Tuesday October 5, 2004: France vows 'discreet' bid to free journalists in Iraq

Tuesday October 5, 2004: Private talks collapse for 2 French hostages

To get this far France has sought and obtained intercessions from Sheikh Youssef al-"Shoot-An-American" Qaradawi, Hamas, the Little Chairman, the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah of Hezbollah, and terrorist Shiite Moqtada Sadr, among others. Nice friends.

France has abandoned the practice of diplomacy between plenipotentiaries and will now talk with anyone who can throw a little weight around by virtue of having cut a little throat. M. Barnier thinks France should arrange tea parties for terrorists, while M. Raffarin thinks terrorists are France's best allies.

To be French is to awake newly contemptible everyday.

Jack's government wants to rescue Messrs. Chesnot et Malbrunot not because it is aching with national solicitude but because it is terrified its Islamite appeasements will look to have failed.

But after all the loving applications of luscious French lips to blushing jihadi bottoms what's this?:

Farcical. Lamentable. Simply dangerous. It seems no words are too strong to express France's outrage with a lawmaker who embarked on what the government insists was a private mission to free three hostages in Iraq.

[Didier] Julia, a headstrong lawmaker from President Jacques Chirac's governing party, stunned reporters in Damascus last Friday when he announced a convoy that supposedly had been carrying the hostages to freedom in Syria came under U.S. attack, scuttling their release.

U.S. and French authorities said there was no evidence to support Julia's claims. The French foreign minister accused him of compromising France's indirect contacts with the militant group [scil., terrorists] that claimed to be holding journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot and their Syrian driver.

In France, lawmakers squirmed with anger and embarrassment. Julia's Union for a Popular Movement party is threatening sanctions — possibly by excluding him from its group in parliament.

Julia's initiative was "a deplorable episode in our political life which, had it not been of a nature to imperil the French hostages' lives and the action of French diplomacy, could be described as a tragic farce," said party spokesman Yves Censi.

Socialist former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius called it "absolutely lamentable and, further more, dangerous."

Julia, who is headed back to France, said he couldn't see what the fuss was about.

"For them to be furious with their own failures is one thing," he said. "But I don't see how our passage here and our four-day search on Iraqi territory could have undermined at all the hostages' security."

But is M. Julia the interloper all pretend him to be?:

If you believe what Le Monde is reporting now, they're all liars: every government official who feigned surprise, who anonymously fed the press statements of outrage and condemnation or expressed concern that Julia's operation might have endangered or thwarted official efforts to free Christian Chesnot Georges Malbrunot was in fact enacting a clumsy strategy to distance the government from a botched mission of which it was fully aware from the start.

Read the whole sordid exposé here.

Also see this post over at E-Nough!

To be French is forever having to say you're sorry without the bother of doing so.

[Emphases added.]

The lack of response to this post is in no way indicative of the work put into it.
It's just the subject matter is so sad and pathetic.

I don't come to Pave because I hate the French. I come because I have a hope for them to become the friend and ally in reality, that their leaders always claim to be,when they cynically want to berate us and are wondering if we are paying attention.

PT,

Thanks for the solicitude.

France astounds me. She is a nation that has abandoned her republican principles, such as they were, for everything small.

It's good that you keep bright hopes for her, but everyday France conspires to dash mine.

Regards,
DGB

pathetic. truly pathetic.

if this were the lesiurely '80s these two persons could be new terry waites. i guess by the standards of the '00s, they already are: they're setting records for longevity every day.

but i fear those dreamy pre-yeltsin/CIS days have passed; having murdered that poor brit, even the french surely are at risk for losing their heads to the filthy jihadi pigs soon enough.

i've said it before, i'll say it again: i miss the soviets. i miss reagan. shit's gonna get worse before it gets better.