So I finally got around to looking at the offending Charlie Hebdo cartoons . . .

[Laughing Mirror]

87. They wrapped themselves in the pages of CharlieHebdo

the way others wrapped themselves in Old Glory, after 9-11.

Mass hysteria. George Bush told them to go shopping, and this time around they bought 3 or 5 million copies of a rag they couldn't even get 30,000 people to read before. Largely, I wonder if it wasn't party due to the fact that that particular "journal irresponsable" as CharlieHebdo trumpets on its cover, just happens to have jumped onto George Bush's crusade against terror following 9-11, and has pushed that neo-conservative war machine ever since. President Chirac did not jump on the bandwagon, and concerning CharlieHebdo's printing the Danish cartoons, said in 2006: "I condemn all manifest provocations susceptible of dangerously stoking passions" (word for word translation).

Of course, nobody knows any of the background of leftist CharlieHebdo magazine's editorial swerve to the George Bush war machine of the right-wing some 13 years ago. I didn't know about this either, the new path CharlieHebdo, the new war path, was on until I read a long article, written a year ago, from a cartoonist who left CharlieHebdo right after 9-11, just exactly because of that new bent the magazine had taken. He saw how it had turned, among other things, into a place with a newfound fanaticism constantly targeting anything Arab, African, Black, people who represented a significant unrepresented minority in this country, France. Now it all made sense. Don't attack the powers that be, attack the people who have no power. The height or irresponsibility. But that's the magazine's credo. How funny is that?

Watching the fallout from my perch in Paris, only three blocks from that mass assembly at Place de la Répubiguqe, is quite interesting. The repressive measures have already begun.

Hallelujah JeSuisCharlie. Voilà the fallout of your avowed irresponsibility, Charlie.