Wampum

Dominique de Villepin appeared before two juges d'instruction this morning as a witness in the Clearstream investigation. de Villepin is the current Prime Minister of France. Good government requires accountability from the governing, even from "un petit de".

In the parallel universe, where party is nothing and triangulation is everything, Mme. Ségolène Royal is running a campaign staffed only by her people -- no Socialists need apply. She appears to have attention deficit disorder, as she can't engage on an issue for long enough to matter, and the issues of everyone else in the PS leadership, poverty, civil rights, jobs, ... are just other people's ideas. Wierd. It is as if the PS determined that the Party should wither away, not the State, so the right has already won the '07 Presidentials.

Not content with having driven the core of the former Soviet Union from bankruptcy to energy exporter wealth, reversing the "Victory over Communism" celebrated by the Ronald Reagan cult, and re-extending the political control of Moscow over Europe between the Volga and the Vistula via GasProm, he's forced the EU nuclear states (weapons and fuel cycle complete, taken together) to choose between Washington and Moscow, and Moscow won again, so Tehran won't be sanctioned by the UN for enrichment of uranium for use generating electrical power.

He's pretty good as President of Russia.

There's a "for life" job open in Turkmenistan. Santa could transport him there in one of the "rendition program" air assets, which shuttle between Poland and the Steppes of Central Asia, and we could go back to a constitutional form of government, in which even the conservatives don't forget their ideas the moment they utter them, and we all get to rediscover law and goverment, not the fragile imitation of government without law.