Mark Who? · 5 May 2002
This column happened awhile ago. So?
Mark Steyn, moist and attentive lapdog – eager filler-in of blanks – wrote that gruntingly uninformed take on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fluke showing in the second round of France’s presidential election. Steyn’s hook was that some pious French diplomat at a beano said that George W. Bush could never get so close to leading this country: “For a creature of such crude, simplistic and extreme views to be one of the two principal candidates in a presidential election would be inconceivable here. Inconceivable!”
Hahaha! Steyn explodes, spraying the table with soup. Froggie snob gets Le Pen right in the face! That’ll larn ’im!
But in truth the man Steyn is paid to apologize for – the twitching chimp that is Bush fils – would not in fact get any play in France. Le Pen, for all his hateful shroud, for all his loony ramblings, has a charisma and public confidence for which Dubya can only dream. One doesn’t hear everything Le Pen says through a filter of certain knowledge that the ideas came from someone else; he doesn’t project the air of a puppet controlled by other, smarter men – though that’s all moot now.
Kind of like how Mark Steyn doesn’t project the air of someone not controlled by other, smarter men. That those men are editors at the wrong-and-strong Spectator and the shipwrecked National Post, well, that’s funny.
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