Here's the other great comment I saw in the Chron, from a story about Jean-Marie Le Pen and who makes up most of his voters. Have I told you how much I love the French?

But in a residential neighborhood about a mile north of the Front headquarters, one white-haired woman, walking a small dog, said she is a longtime Le Pen supporter.

"For me, all the other politicians are rotten," she said, identifying herself only as Claude, 72. "There's only one who has the values of General de Gaulle, and that's Le Pen."

"He's not a racist," she added. "He's only against Jews. And what can I say about that?"

You know, I was gonna say stuff about Le Pen and what a hoot it is that the French have just totally embarrassed themselves. Again. But it's not funny anymore. Let's face it, this world is going to hell-in-a-hand-basket quicker than you can say hell-in-a-hand-basket.

We got this huge conflict in the Middle East that gets scary mainly because all three religions that hail from there all claim that the end of the world comes just from the particular spot where it's all going down. On one side, you have a group of people that think it's a really neat idea to send 15 and 16 year old kids on suicide missions and whose allies have been holding Jerry Lewis-like telethons to raise money for the "martyrs of the cause," ie suicide bombers. On the other side is a leader who just recently refused to even discuss tearing down the settlements despite the fact everyone in his country, everyone in our country, everyone in the entire fucking world, knows that it's one of the main reason's why people in his country keep on getting blown up by 15 and 16 year old kids.

Then there's the Saudi Prince, who just paid us visit and supposedly lectured Smirk-boy about the Middle-East and what's wrong with the U.S. The Saudi Prince is also said to have forbidden women air traffic controllers to handle his flight in. And we're getting lectured from him. From a country that won't even allow women to drive cars.

And finally there's Europe. On one side is the anti-globalization, anti-American, vaguely anti-semitic left, a group so fucked they blew the French elections because they were too busy splitting votes between three or four Trotskyite candidates (Trotskyite! Trotskyite! Haven't they gotten the memo that Communism didn't fucking work? Didn't they realize that as a political theory, it's SO 19th century? What's next, are they gonna try and support Feudalism?). Then there's the neo-fascist, xenophobic, vaguely anti-semitic right and let's just say we all know how well things go when Europe starts voting in neo-fascists. Stuck in the middle, the only hope of salvation, is the muddled, wimpy bureaucrats who've spent the better part of the past decade having sub-committee's on subcommittee's on committee's just to figure out what to put on the fucking Euro. Let's just say that if the shit came down and Europe said "don't worry, we got your back," I'd be watching my back. Europe is Bill Paxton in "Aliens." Europe is the Judean's People Front debating resolutions while poor Brian is about to be crucified. If Europe were a basketball team, they'd be the Trailblazers.


And who's the man on whose shoulders the whole world now rests on? W.

I'd pretty much say that it's even odds that we're all seriously fucked right now.