This one is too rich to pass up. Leave your entry in the comments. The winner will be announced Thursday afternoon. One winner this time with the usual prize - a $25 Amazon e-gift certificate or PayPal donation, winner’s choice.

Chirac: Is that anti-Americanism in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Schroeder: Why can’t it be both?

**UPDATE**

Congrats to caption contest Mark J @ Tempus Fugit.

On the one hand, the EU could be dealt a final, crippling blow by the rejection of the constitution. On the other hand, a French YES would have also given more credibility to the removal of France from the UN security council.

THE leader of France’s ruling party has privately admitted that Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution will result in a “no” vote, throwing Europe into turmoil.
“The thing is lost,” Nicolas Sarkozy told French ministers during an ill-tempered meeting. “It will be a little ‘no’ or a big ‘no’,” he was quoted as telling Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, whom he accused of leading a feeble campaign.

[...]

President Chirac will go on television tonight to deliver a last-ditch appeal to his country to resist the temptation to vote “no” and trigger a crisis for the whole European Union.

But the President, who called the referendum in July last year but has done little campaigning, was reported to be pessimistic and telling visitors to the Elysée Palace that he expected a “no”.

M Sarkozy’s outburst came after M Raffarin, who is expected to lose his job in the event of a defeat, told ministers and the leadership of M Chirac’s UMP party that they should avoid defeatism but be prepared to limit the damage from the crisis from a “no”, party sources said.

After Philippe Douste-Blazy, the Health Minister, insisted that “we should trust the head of state”, M Sarkozy retorted: “Everything has to change — our way of doing politics . . . the labour law.” He said that the UMP would demand changes after the referendum and that “the Government had better follow the party”, the sources said.

M Sarkozy wants to be President and is locked in a bitter rivalry with M Chirac. The leaking of the row by M Sarkozy’s camp was a sign of the rising bad blood between the party leader and M Chirac’s team.

I guess I will just have to settle for reveling in Chirac’s international embarrassment and potential ouster from office after the next round of French elections.

Hey France, Germany, & Spain:

Bite me.

Jacques Chirac’s continues to prove he is no friend of the United States or Democracy - all the while John Kerry continues to elevate France as one of those “allies” he could convince to help us in Iraq.

Take, for example, this week’s bucket of bile from Chirac (hardly covered in the MSM):

HANOI President Jacques Chirac of France warned Thursday of a catastrophe for global diversity if the United States’ cultural leadership goes unchallenged.

Speaking at a French cultural center in Hanoi before the opening Friday of a summit meeting of European and Asian leaders, Chirac said France was right to stand up for cultural and linguistic diversity.

The French president warned that the world’s different cultures could be “choked” by U.S. values.

This, he said, would lead to a “general world subculture” based around the English language. This, he maintained, would be “a real ecological catastrophe.” - IHT

Also this week we learn that France had their hands so far into Saddam’s pockets they could have scratched his balls for him:

“Duelfer’s investigators did find evidence of long-term Iraqi efforts to develop relationships with French businessmen who claimed they could influence French politicians.

The report describes a mysterious “Jean Claude,” referred to as “Mr. Claude,” who brought a tank carrier to Baghdad in 1998.

Another, possibly the same man, identified as “Mr. Cloud” in other Iraqi documents, is described as a French expert in electronic warfare - the art of detecting and jamming enemy electronics.

“Cloud” met with Iraqis in November 2002 to discuss “microwave, direction finding and passive radar technology,” according to meeting logs recovered by the Iraq Survey Group.

A top official of the French arms marketer SOFEMA, which sells advanced avionics for military aircraft, also turned up meeting with Iraqis in recovered records.” - NY Daily News

Then there is this:

A human rights group yesterday condemned French President Jacques Chirac for his comments on the arms embargo placed on China by the European Union over the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, saying they dishonored those fighting for justice over the massacre.

Chirac, who wants the EU to lift the embargo sparked by China’s crackdown of pro-democracy campaigners in Beijing 15 years ago, said this week that the sanctions were the product of “another time.”

“We will try to get the EU to lift as soon as possible an embargo which is of another time and which does not correspond any more to the reality of the situation,” Chirac said in the interview…

But the comments by the French leader, who arrived in China on Friday for an official visit, provoked a stinging response from Human Rights in China (HRIC) in a statement yesterday.

“President Chirac’s remarks conveniently ignore China’s obligations under international human rights law,” HRIC said in the statement, noting that China had signed and vowed to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“Crimes against humanity such as those committed by the Nazis in World War II, under apartheid in South Africa and during the genocide in Rwanda, are not diminished or erased by the mere passage of years or even decades.

“Likewise the bloody suppression of unarmed civilians in Beijing in 1989 cannot be considered a matter of `another time’ after 15 short years,” the New York-based rights group added.

Meanwhile media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres used Chirac’s visit to China to condemn yesterday a French company’s sale of equipment to Beijing used to block foreign radio broadcasts.

Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) said French defense electronics group Thales had provided the Chinese government with antennae that were being used to scramble broadcasts from foreign radio stations.

“It is regrettable that a French company is involved in setting up a `great wall of sound’ that violates the right of free access to information for hundreds of millions of people,” the group said in a statement.

The antennae were being used to jam programs from stations such as Norway-based Voice of Tibet, the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, it said.

Thales had set up such an antenna in the city of Kashgar in northwestern Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government says there is a separatist movement.

There are understood to be around a dozen further such installations, including on Hainan Island, near the eastern city of Nanjing and Urumqi, also in Xinjiang, it said.

The statement said a Thales representative in China told the media group that “there was nothing in the contracts signed with the Chinese that specified the use of the equipment”, sold to Chinese authorities in 2001 and 2002.

The French government should draw the attention of its companies to the dangers of selling certain equipment to the Chinese authorities, it said.

“It would be a shame if French firms became auxiliaries of the Chinese Communist Party as in the case of Italian Iveco vehicles, converted in China into mobile execution chambers,” it said. - Taipei Times

Jacques Chirac proves time and time again he is no friend to America and no friend to democracy and freedom and this is the guy John Kerry is hanging his hat on?

This man cares about two things: making a buck off the misery of others while jamming an extended middle-finger up the collective ass of the United States of America and our true friends.

Well, in the words of Sean Penn, “All best, and a sincere f!@k you.”