When the French are Right, who's Left?

I've been feeling pretty smug lately watching the Republicans self-destruct and go into freefall. It just seems like these pinheads wouldn't know what to do with a life preserver if they were drowning. Look at the field of Presidential hopefuls they are putting up. At last week's debate three of them admitted they don't believe in the theory of evolution.

Obviously it's too soon for the Left to claim total victory, but the pendulum in this country is pretty clearly swinging in that direction. Here's what Newsweek is reporting:

May 5, 2007 - It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir.

That people disapprove of Bush is not surprising. He's a boob and a bungler, and Rove & Cheney weren't going to be able to keep that fact under wraps forever. The really good news is that his borderline retarded handling of policy, both domestic and international, has revealed the bankruptcy of the Right's ideas and agenda. The direction in which the Bush administration and Republican leadership have taken this country have been like a slap in the face, waking Americans up to the reality of what it means to have the Right in control of policy. Suddenly, as the Polls show, Americans are interested in fixing the health care system and stopping the war in Iraq more than anything else.
It seems like we are becoming more like France.
Bill Maher had a great rant recently about the way the American Right (O'Reilly, Hannity, et. al.) uses France like a "get out of jail free card" in any argument, as in "John Kerry seems French, therefore he couldn't be a good president." He then goes on to note all the things we could learn from the French, like how to design a workable healthcare system. All of which makes it kind of ironic that France seems to want to be more like the US.

Even with its universal healthcare and 35-hour work week, France is already more like the US than any other country in Europe--I'm basing this primarily on their taste for malls, suburbs and shallow but sensational tv news. Economically and politically France shifted to the right under Chirac, but the leftist spirit still remained strong.

I don't know whether Sarko's policies will be a good or bad thing for France, but when I look at the mess the Right has made of the US, and the fact that we finally seem to have figured that out, I have to wonder if the French know what they are getting themselves into.