Baddest. Frenchman. Ever.

A French motorist has been given a three-month suspended prison sentence for doing his level best to run over a pedestrian he mistakenly identified as Osama bin Laden.

The self-employed man of 35, named only as Pierre, was found guilty in the southern city of Montpellier on Tuesday of pursuing his intended victim through several red lights and then into a pedestrian zone.

The pedestrian only narrowly avoided being mown down when the car finally ran into a wall.

In times like these, it's always nice to whip out some lofty conservative scholarship and let it stew a bit... hmm... care for some Robert Kagan?

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.

Watch for my highbeams, Kagan

Nico Pitney
http://www.notgeniuses.com