Doesn't it just warm your heart that Conservatives/Republicans SUDDENLY care about the French?

[KansDem]

3. Yeah, what happened to "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys?"

It was a sad, but sadly not isolated, moment of U.S. hostility toward France. Today, when Mitt Romney dared to reference his family's vacations to France -- "I have a lot of memories of France," he said, "and I look forward to occasional vacations again in such a beautiful place" -- political reporters immediately declared it a terrible misstep. "Note to politicians: Don't talk about France. Ever. Unless you are condemning it somehow," tweeted the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza. The "entire" Politico newsroom apparently "erupted" with cries of "oh no" at his comments.

Sadly, they are probably right. In 2003, Americans' popular attitudes toward France were worse than toward any other European country, including Russia: 60 percent unfavorable and 29 percent favorable. Those numbers were about on par with U.S. attitudes toward Saudi Arabia, which many Americans still believe was responsible for September 11 (there is little to no evidence for this). France's numbers have improved since then -- 63 percent favorable and 31 percent unfavorable as of 2010 -- but American unfavorability toward France still scored higher than toward, for example, Egypt. This is remarkable for a country that shares our revolutionary democratic history and has fought alongside the U.S. in nearly every American war since independence. Of course, French anti-Americanism has its own long history.

The recent low point in U.S.-French relations was in 2003, when the French government opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But so had Germany, and no one tried to rename sauerkraut. There was something about France, and it didn't begin during the Bush administration. In 1945, when American soldiers flooded liberated France, the U.S. Army was so worried about the troops' Francophobia that it issued them a pamphlet encouraging cultural understanding. 112 Gripes About the French listed, and then retorted, the most common American negative stereotypes about France. Yes, there were 112 of them.

The Simpsons crystallized American Francophobia a decade before the Iraq War with a 1995 show calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," a reference to their purportedly snobby tastes and weak military. In fact, per capita cheese consumption is almost exactly the same in France as it is in the U.S., and the French military managed to conquer most of Europe, as well as northern and western Africa. (Americans needed British, Russian, and yes French help to take the same lands that Napoleon Bonaparte had seized with no major ally.) But the phrase stuck -- how many other one-off Simpsons jokes made it into the Oxford quotation dictionary twice? -- not because it was factually true but because it perfectly encapsulated the American perception.

--more--
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/beyond-freedom-fries-the-roots-of-american-francophobia/256253/