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Showing posts with the label true confessions

Let's Try The French Way...

Let's try it the French way... It is in the nature of all politicians to give hostages to fortune. So we can't really hold it against Brian Lenihan that he once, by his own account, deputising for Brian Cowen, went to Brussels and said: "Nous cherchons le soft landing." There is a scene in True Confessions (the film from John Gregory Dunne's novel) where seedy New York cop Robert Duvall raids a whorehouse, and one prostitute, in an effort to save her own skin, squeals: "Hey officer, not me. I do awful good French." As we try to drag our bruised bottoms up off the cold, hard landing, we may yet be grateful that our Finance Minister does awful good French. The French, you see, have turned it around (no joke intended). Along with the Germans, their economy grew between April and June, while ours plummeted into an abyss. And there was nothing laissez-faire about it either. They began with the same problems as the rest of us. They had negative growth, they ha