F– The French

The other day, Calpundit posted his list of interesting conservative weblogs. Someone in the comments section said I should be (I am not sure how conservative I really am), and this jackass sneered:

Balloon Juice is just another one of those French-bashing snicker snicker types. Best to avoid.

Hehe. At any rate, why bash the French, when all you have to do is point out what they are doing:

France was on Friday resisting a US-backed plan to lift UN sanctions against Libya in exchange for financial compensation for victims of the 1988 Lockerbie aircraft bombing, saying that victims of a later attack should also get a similar pay-out.

France “is not prepared to waver on this,” foreign ministry spokesperson Cecile Pozzo di Borgo said on Thursday, referring to a demand that Libya provide more compensation for the families of 170 people killed in the 1989 blast that brought down a French airliner over west Africa.

So France is going to use its position on the Security Council to block the lifting of sanctions, scuttling the deal, because it is better than the deal they negotiated several years ago (a deal that did not even think about the Lockerbie victims).

Libya, two of whose nationals were sentenced and jailed over the attack, has now agreed to pay out $2.7bn to victims’ families in exchange for a gradual lifting of international sanctions.

However France has said it wants similar compensation for the families of the 170 people who died when an airliner operated by the UTA company was blown out of the sky by a bomb over the Sahara Desert less than a year later, on September 19, 1989.

Libya has already paid