A rustle in the tall grass of French politics this weekend, but it was only Dominique de Villepin — self-published poet, owner of very important hair, perpetual appointee, and a Napoleon groupie — emerging into the sunlight just long enough to hiss at Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French left has interesting and exciting political ideas about as often as congressional Republicans do, so all the political news comes from the French center-right (which equates to the Massachusetts center-left), where the discredited Chirac wing of the UMP takes shots at UMP members who have jobs. De Vil, who will be unemployed until Chirac is re-elected president, said the reason there hadn’t been a lot of celebrations commemorating the second anniversary of Sarko’s presidential victory was that “there hasn’t been much to celebrate.”

Other than the fact that Sarkozy has kept most of the UMP’s noxious elitists on the periphery of power, there probably aren’t a lot of great moments in Sarko’s presidency so far, at least of those moments spent in public. There have been far fewer, however, in Villepin’s post-Iraq political life, smeared as it is with all that Chirac grease. But always finishing behind Sarkozy is not why Villepin’s sniping. His hope, as Le Figaro reported, is to provoke a reaction from Sarkozy so he can claim his September Clearstream civil trial is just a political retribution for trying to fabricate a scandal involving Sarkozy.

So he chose a meaningless moment created by the media savvy foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who was asked over the weekend by Le Parisien which way he’d vote in the European parliament elections coming up in early June. Kouchner, who was a maverick Socialist until his appointment by Sarkozy in 2007, said he’d think it over, and decide later.

Wrong answer for Sarkozy, right answer for Kouchner. It took Kouchner an extremely well-publicized “hestitation” of about 120 news stories and two full news cycles with lots of pictures of him in the newspapers and on TV to say that actually, what he meant to tell Le Parisien was that Sarkozy was a personal inspiration to him so of course he’d be voting for his boss’s candidates.