In which the French continue to make it easy for me to laugh at them instead of at Belgians

Sorry if this entry seems a little crabby but I am in one shit mood this morning. This weekend was just so good and now work is an unwelcoming prospect. And I just got an email with a picture of my impending bridesmaid dress. 3 C-notes, destined to be traded in for a sack of empire-waist polyester I won't even be able to use as a cleaning rag afterwards. I have a good mind to propose to the F-word so I'll never have to do this again. And clothe my bridesmaids in linen.

On a happier note, Nicholas Sarkozy is pressing criminal libel charges against the Nouvel Observateur, the French newspaper/website that broke the news of his 'if you come back, I'll call everything off' SMS to the wife who'd dumped him last autumn, which he's purported to have sent eight days before marrying Carla Bruni. This is the first time either ever or else in yonks a French president has initiated criminal proceedings against a media outlet so it's very exciting, especially as the Nouvel Observateur is not backing down; indeed, the reporter concerned has elaborated that Sarkozy has been continuing to message his ex constantly.

The question for many people is why he would have done something as drastic as criminal proceedings (the reporter is looking at a possible three year prison sentence) instead of a civil suit, and the answers that come up again and again are, first, that in a criminal suit of this sort, you can force a journalist to reveal his sources (Cécilia?), and second, that Sarkozy is counting on the case being dismissed before it can progress too far but after everybody has forgotten everything about it besides the fact that he pressed charges; criminal cases advance much more slowly and require much more evidence than civil ones in France.

Can you tell how awesome I think all of this is? It's fucking awesome. All he had to do was ignore the story, which didn't even show up in the print version of the newspaper and was couched in conditional language; or have his press office deny it and say, oh, I don't know, that he was too busy being the fucking president of a G-7 country to bother pursuing such a shitty little falsehood in court. But no - he had to turn it into a face-off between the national media and the presidency, to the degree that now all the papers have a great excuse to turn on him just as his popularity is plummeting in all their polls (he's had no balls with the reforms he'd promised, alienating his supporters, and he's a proto-fascist, alienating everyone else). Now he's got Reporters Without Borders bitching him out.

Fucking awesome. Awesome! Because of course there's a third reason he'd have initiated such a drastic action, and such a stupid one in a climate of his crashing popularity ratings, and that's that the man who the French have chosen to lead their country, the man whose finger is on the nuclear button, is so pussywhipped by an aging Italian supermodel who's jealous of his ex-wife that he's lost his fucking mind. Fucking awesome!