OK, OK. Numerous people have written in to complain about my failure to provide a translation of those words by Talleyrand. Je m’excuse. I was lulled into linguistic insensitivity by the virtuosity of all the Corner readers who tackled the translation challenge posed by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys (recent efforts have included Greek, Hawaiian, Esperanto, Hebrew, Persian and a blatantly faked ur-language).

Anyway, Talleyrand’s phrase (“Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.”) translates as “they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”, appropriate words to read in conjunction with de Villepin’s remarks about “an old country that does not forget”.

Talleyrand’s original comments, of course, referred to aristocrats forced to flee France in the early years of the French revolution. They are a reminder that while France may be an “old country”, the structure of its government is relatively novel. Despite a tricky patch in the early 1860s the US has operated under the same system since 1788, a time when France was still a monarchy. As a reader points out, since then, France has restored its monarchy once, been an empire twice, and a republic five times.

A reader writes with his account of the protests in Manhattan. To his disappointment, he discovered that trying to discuss matters with the demonstrators proved to be fruitless (a feature of these events is their frivolity: there are serious questions to be asked about the current US policy towards Iraq, but, as we both discovered, you would not have heard them today).

As he recalls, “At some point, someone behind me said I was just a brainwashed corporate stooge, so arguing was pointless. As to the latter, I couldn't have agreed more.”

Unlike me, he saw some “sporadic violence” (pushing and yelling). The biggest drama I witnessed was a noisy (but completely peaceful) incident when a couple of policemen ordered two demonstrators down from a tree.

As the two failed Tarzans eventually began to swing down (well, clamber down rather awkwardly) from the branches, the commentary from two fifty-something women standing near me was hostile:

“New York City cops always behave like a**holes”.

I wonder if that is what they were saying on 9/11.

My correspondent also noted how the NYPD’s mounted police seemed “to arouse more ire than the foot units actually wearing riot gear. Many protesters called the police a bunch of fascists, and one called the mounted officers Nazis. When I asked how it was that they were Nazis, he replied that they were dressed like Nazis. I asked how they were dressed like Nazis, and he said they were wearing helmets and uniforms.”

That wasn’t a good thing to say to my correspondent (a retired army officer, whose old field jacket had already prompted more than a few sneers). It was also a little ironic, given the affection that so many of today’s demonstrators were proclaiming for the UN.

As I found out today, the NYPD’s mounted police wear light blue helmets.

Demonstrators have (the Washington Post reports) been out in Baghdad too, marching for, er, peace, Saddam-style:

"In Baghdad, tens of thousands of Iraqis, many carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, demonstrated to support Saddam Hussein and denounce the United States. "Our swords are out of their sheaths, ready for battle," read one of hundreds of banners carried by marchers along Palestine Street, a broad Baghdad avenue."

One immaculately dressed old man, watching the proceedings from his wheelchair, was not impressed. “Neville Chamberlain,” he announced to no one in particular, “peace in our time,” he jeered at the demonstrators.

Intrigued, I went over – it’s not often you hear the names of mid-twentieth century Tory prime ministers being shouted out in a Manhattan street. The heckler turned out to be Hungarian, a survivor of that other Europe’s hideous past. “I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this before” he explained, “the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. You can’t negotiate with Saddam. You can only negotiate with real countries, with Canada, with Mexico. Not with Saddam. You can’t negotiate with a cockroach.”

Tell that to the French.

Most of the other placards were predictable – many variations on the familiar ‘no blood for oil’ blather, and the usual attacks on Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Some demonstrators were calling for a ‘free Palestine’, but none, so far as I could see, for a free Iraq.

Amongst the better efforts: “Fuggedaboudid – Brooklyn for peace”, “duct tape for peace” and, in a nod to today’s weather, “freezing my ass off for peace”. More mysteriously, “Lisa is against the war!” and so are the “Women in Black.”

Women in black? If they were searching for aliens, they wouldn’t have had to look far. At 11.30 this morning “Raelians for peace” could be found at 52nd and 3rd.

Large crowds in the neighborhood, but from the vantage point of a dense mass of people jam-packed in Second Avenue in the high 50s, it was quite impossible to say how many. Trying to get anywhere near the ‘official’ demonstration site on 49th Street and First Avenue was beyond me and, it seemed, many others.

Plenty of ANSWER banners and, in a surprising echo of countless demonstrations in the UK, placards bearing the logo of the Socialist Worker Party – stalwarts of Britain’s hard left happenings for decades.

Also there for the picking, leaflets from the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. Their “vital Marxist-Leninist-Maoist viewpoint?"

“There is growing anger, rebellion and resistance around the world – and this is excellent!”

Speaking of the French ruling class of an earlier time, Talleyrand, a somewhat shrewder French diplomat, put it rather better:

“Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.”

That is, clearly, still true. Or as the French like to say:

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

To say that all today’s anti-war protestors have an agenda far removed from the ‘peace’ that they proclaim would, of course, be unfair. Still, it says something that the first two demonstrators I saw this morning (I live not far from where the New York City protest is scheduled to take place) were two tatty ageing veterans of the 1960s both wearing tatty ageing symbols of that era’s carnage chic - badges honoring Che Guevara.

On second thoughts, this was, perhaps, only appropriate. Guevara was a warmonger and a terrorist and he was, it has to be admitted, rather popular with the French.

<----(That sounds like what Girl Scouts in Vermont sell at cookie time.)

But Kathryn, Julie fought back. She told them some people in the CSA believe in this war and enjoy delicious organic produce, so knock off the politicking on a veggie listserv. She was seconded by a woman with a New York Times e-mail address, who said she didn't agree with Julie on the war, but very much agreed that the organic veggie list was no place for political propagandizing. I say crunchy-cons gots to fight for the right to be Right!

Robert Chambers, AKA "The Preppie Murderer," went home today from prison today. I never knew him but I knew lots of people who did. I also dated Jennifer Levin, the girl he murdered, for a while in high school. It's bizarre to think that he's been in prison for essentially both of our adult lives. I don't feel sorry for him, but it does make me appreciate a bit more that jail time is a real punishment.

Chief Inspector Blix threw another smoke grenade at the U.N. Security Council today. Though his experts' found that Iraq's al Fatah and al Samoud-2 missiles were both capable of exceeding the limits that the U.N. imposed, he only said that the missiles "could be" a prima facie case that Iraq is in material breach of Resolution 1441. And he took great pains to pooh-pooh Colin Powell's evidence by saying that the movement of decontamination equipment from a suspected chemical weapons site could be "incidental" and isn't proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No one will ever confuse Blix with Joe Friday.

The most telling reaction to Blix's report was that of Farouk al Shara, the Syrian representative. Syria -- whose wholly owned subsidiary, Hezbollah, continues to be one of the world's most dangerous terrorist groups--says that any war in Iraq will impede the war against terrorism. No more precise statement of the truth's opposite is imaginable. The U.N. inspections are an expensive charade, and the price is too high a risk to our national security. With the U.N. or without it, with NATO or with our new coalition, the time to take military action against Saddam is now. Let's get it done. Saddam delendus est.

I didn't make a big deal out of it, but Wheaton's blog really is worth investigating. Here's one reader's response:

I'm reading this guy's blog and two thoughts come to mind: What a pansy and Who the [#$%!] is Will Wheaton? Then I read this in another part of his site:

"Wil Wheaton first entered the public eye in 1986 with his critically acclaimed performance in Rob Reiner's Stand By Me. He spent his teenage years on the starship Enterprise as a series regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Since leaving TNG, Wil has explored a number of different career options. In 1993, Wil put everything he had in a storage locker at Los Angeles Union Station, and tried life as a hobo, riding the rails across the US.

He settled in Florida in early 1995, where he found work at The Waffle House, on route 90. Wheaton had found his calling, it seemed, until a tragic accident known only as "the pigs-in-a-blanket-fiasco" drove him out of the Waffle House, and, ultimately, out of Florida completely."

I think we all know what "the pigs-in-a-blanket-fiasco" means.

Oh, that is beyond wonderful! The Post has had its legendary columnist Steve Dunleavy, a thin, pompadoured Aussie made of gristle, who lives on cigarettes and booze, to France. He's going around the country carrying a stuffed weasel under his arms, sending back dispatches filled with abuse and invective against the French. I understand even Le Monde has taken notice.

Everybody knows about the HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR cover headline, but the Post is always coming up with great ones. Two of my favorite Post covers (or "woods," as tabloid jargon has it) were as follows: 1) reporting the conviction of a computer nerd who met a kinky sex partner online, and was later charged with torturing her, the headline read: JURY TO OLIVER: "YOU'VE GOT JAIL!" And 2) reporting the divorcing Carol Channing's contention that her husband withheld affection from her, the headline, over a picture of Channing shrugging her shoulders and looking comically disappointed, screamed: NO SEX FOR 30 YEARS: 'HELL NO, DOLLY!'.

Just one of the many reasons to love New York...

Someone tell Will Wheaton -- AKA Star Trek's Wesley Crusher -- to turn down the volume on his internal monologue. Nobody wants to hear it.

Thanks to all of you, military chaplains and friends of military chaplains, who responded to my first post. I've spent the last couple of days having some amazing conversations with some very fine men serving their country and their God in the chaplain corps. Some of the things they've lived through ... well, you'll just have to buy the next issue of NRODT to read about it (so subscribe already). Their stories, and their dedication, are definitely are the antidote for wimpiness in the pulpit.

I have another request, this one for veterans or currently serving military personnel: Has a military chaplain ever touched your life in a profound way? Helped you through a serious crisis? Shown you to a deeper faith in God? Been an example of courage and goodness and the light of God in a dark place? Write me and tell me about it. Assume that anything you send me will be quotable, unless you explicitly tell me not to use your name. Send to rdreher@nationalreview.com.

Kudos to Andrew Sullivan for blogging on a column from Brit Boris Johnson, who introduces a terrific neologism, gallistic, which means going hog-wild with French-bashing. Here's Johnson in the Telegraph explaining why French perfidy is bringing the English public around to supporting the war:

"Just as everyone was laying into the Number 10 spin machine, the French did something so disgusting, so selfish, and so French, that the British media have had no choice. The press has dropped Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier, in favour of that time-honoured staple of the British journalist - the orgy of frog-bashing. Confronted by French treachery, previously fence-sitting newspapers such as the Daily Mail have suddenly seen the merit of the war, and the downmarket tabloids have gone gallistic. You know the kind of articles: they involve references to Vichy, tanks with reverse gears, garlic-guzzling peasants, women of loose morals cosying up to the Boche, and they traditionally end with the cry: 'And they eat our children's ponies!'"

On the road with a talking vagina? Why does this concept sound like the nut of a joke that starts out "So a guy walks into a bar..."?

Have any of you Cornerites seen The Vagina Monologues? Not me, but I bought a copy of the script, and read it a couple of years ago. It's as vulgar and stupid as you might imagine. It's like reading a concentrated issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, except Cosmo doesn't have pretensions to art. It is beyond me why any woman would see this kind of meretricious trash as liberating, or even meaningful. But to hear the show's fans go on, you'd think that they were the new suffragettes, bravely defying all those vicious Patriarchal Penis People who want to deny women the opportunity to sit around and talk about their cooches. I mean, please.

I was just on this public radio show, "To The Point." The subject was, you guessed it, the French. For the first part, I was paired with this French academic who insisted I wasn't worth responding to; that National Review isn't worth responding to etc. Everything I said was based in "ignorance" everything he said was an objective fact. He played his part perfectly, right up through the moment he hung up and ran away from the debate. I don't mean to be unsportsmanlike, but this guy was unbelievably arrogant.

From a former Naval officer:

Jonah,

They even have mandated working hours, to the extent that in the mid-80's, the Swedes allowed a Russian submarine penetrate their territorial waters, but allowed it to slip back out to open water because the crewof the Swedish frigate tracking the sub would have rated overtime pay for staying out past their 5:00PM knock-off time. On a side note, the pay scale for the average US nuclear submarine captain, assuming a little fudging for 6 months a year at sea where he is on duty 24X7, and 6 mos ashore where he is on duty maybe 10X5, makes somewhere between $22 and $30 an hour, before taxes. Something to mull over.

Interesting piece in today's WSJ (no link) on how Europe's NATO members let their militaries falter. One factor I didn't know about is the pervasiveness of European military trade unions. They make reform exceedingly difficult. Apparently, Belgian soldiers held a protest rally which had to be dispersed by the police with water cannons. Something tells me that if the Marines decided to riot, the Washington police would ask someone else to bust out the water cannon.

From a good piece in the Philadelphia Inquirier:

Creator Matt Groening has been skewering Gallic mores since the show's first season. In the 1990 episode "The Crepes of Wrath," Bart goes to France as an exchange student, only to be exploited by unscrupulous wine dealers.

But it was an episode eight years ago that spawned an insult for the ages. Groundskeeper Willie, forced by budget cuts to teach French at Springfield's elementary school, bellows to the class in his rich Scottish burr, "BONJOURRRRRR, ye cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys."

The phrase, kept alive ever since by Internet bloggers and columnist Jonah Goldberg, has caused puzzlement in France. On Saturday, conservative newspaper Le Figaro translated it as "primates capitulards et toujours en quête de fromages," or, roughly, "capitulating primates always questing for cheeses."

I'm noodling something. I was wondering if anybody knows whether paranoid delusions about the government pre-dated the welfare/national security state. In other words, did people in the 19th (or 14th) century believe the government was watching them? I would assume not, but I simply don't know. I'm wondering if certain forms of paranoia -- religious, superstitious, demonic etc -- have been transferred to fear of the state. I know this isn't an entirely new idea. After all the whole idea of the "anti-Communist witch hunt" -- the quotation marks are necessary since there were real witches in our midst -- is predicated on the notion that government-enabled hysteria is a real fear. But what I find interesting is that even real mental cases think the CIA bugs their brains, talks to them through receivers in their heads etc. I know that there are real physiological reasons for this, but what form did these physiological manifestations take before there was a CIA? Was it the devil? God? The Masons? (Before we imagined rectal-probing aliens were constantly visiting us, what malevolant forces were making us sing moon river?)

I ask, because maybe it's possible that one of the major historical factors explaining the rise of secularism and liberal society -- among other things -- is that the State replaced other forces as the object of our fears and hopes. Anyway, it's just something I'm noodling.

Scroll down to the tenth cartoon, "An American in Paris."

If I don't think the French are being cowardly, why do I keep using the phrase? That's the question several reporters and interviewers have asked me over the last week or so. The answer is simple: They keep asking me to. It's become my own "Whatyoutalkingwillis?" or "Well, excuuuuse me!"

I did one live debate for British TV a couple weeks ago and the host of the show, went out of the way during the commercial break to ask me to say the words for his audience. It's very weird.

Baby Lucy and Momma Jessica are doing great, but still in the hospital until at least tomorrow. So, I'm clearing the decks, getting back in gear etc. Thanks to everybody for their kind notes, advice etc. You might not be surprised to hear that I haven't been able to respond to many/any of them, but I am still reading and saving them for Jessica and Lucy to read (though probably not at the same time). Anyway, I might address everything I've learned about fatherhood in a column later on, but in general I am not inclined to make my daughter into regular column fodder. I mean, what would my couch and my dog think?

The truth is that Democrats want to make an example of Miguel Estrada, whose appointment to the bench could make Hispanic voters look more favorably on the Bush administration. They also want to send a message to the White House that when it comes to confirming federal judges, there are some things they simply will not tolerate. Apparently at the top of the list: Independent-minded Hispanic hotshots who don't go around thanking liberals for everything that the nominees have accomplished on their own.

Spike Lee and Edward Norton are disgraceful, despicable men. As mentioned earlier in The Corner, they are in Germany now at a film festival, trashing their country in wartime. "It's nice being in Europe this week," Norton told reporters in Berlin. "Almost everyone in Germany and France is in sync with the governments. I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of my government." If I said what I really felt, K-Lo would ban me permanently from the Corner. If Al Gore were our president, I would feel exactly the same way. You just don't do that to your country. Use the link to read the whole story, and see what these and other shameful Celebrity-Americans, pampered Hollywood prisspots all, are saying abroad.

It is not unpatriotic to dissent from your government's policy. It is unpatriotic and indescribably vile to go stand in the former capital of Nazi Germany, before the children and grandchildren of the SS and the Gestapo, and trash your American president and your American nation.

This should not be forgotten. Somehow, I don't think Rush will let it pass without comment.

A New York reader suggests this explanation for why people were so grim on the subways today. Seems that a NYC newstalk radio station ran with an item this morning saying that a member of the House Intelligence Committee told her daughter, who lives in NYC, to stay out of the subways. When asked about it, the Congresswoman, Jane Harmon, didn't deny warning her daughter, but said it wasn't based on intelligence information (follow the link to the reader's blog for more information). A friend of mine heard the same radio broadcast too.

Pardon me, but the Congresswoman's explanation is hard to believe, given her position on the Intelligence Committee. Anyway, if the authorities have serious reason to believe there's going to be an imminent attack on the city's subways, then they should tell us, and let us plebes make our own minds up about whether or not to use the trains. Me, I'm going to keep using them (like six million other New Yorkers, I've got no choice), but not during rush hour, if I can help it.

A reader from Washington, DC, writes:

"I sympathize with your experience. The train to work this morning was only 3/4 full, very strange for Wednesday morning rush hour. A lot of gallows humor in the building, too. Talk like I hope it's chem (it's really windy today) or bio (cold, too) and not radiological. Speculation about potential blast sites and the length of time for a Stinger to acquire and home to target. Not your usual shop talk."

I'm wondering if Americans elsewhere are equally anxious as those of us who live in cities targeted on 9/11. I know from various contacts in small towns in the heartland that people there are really worried for their own safety. I can't figure this out.

Landrieu is acting out of pique. She almost certainly would not have supported the filibuster if the GOP hadn't gone nuclear at her. What happened was that she already had made statements indicating she was leaning against a filbuster, and keeping options open on final confirmation. Rather than trying to work with her, quietly, to get her more fully on board [Frist's office] played hardball by releasing her campaign ad specifically to Louisiana media. Coming, as it did, on the heels of a particularly nasty campaign run against her, this hardball was too much for her to take. It was only AFTER they played hardball that she announced her decision to support the filibuster; matter of fact, there's pretty good evidence it was the hardball that tipped her the wrong way, sort of in a "I'll teach you not to mess with me" kind of way, especially considering she's not up for re-election again until 2008.

None of this excuses her utterly asinine and unethical support of the filibuster, but it should serve as a lesson: Play hardball against lefties, but when it comes to Democratic putative moderates, try honey first. That's what Ronald Reagan did. If honey doesn't work, THEN play hardball, and play it rough and play to win. But in this case, the premature hardball was hamhanded and counterproductive.

And Estrada is one vote farther away from confirmation because of it.