Time: Marine Le Pen And Sarah Palin: Who Is More Extreme?

[pampango]

http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/03/11/marine-le-pen-and-sarah-palin-who-is-more-extreme/

As her popularity and credibility as a presidential candidate has grown among a rising number of French voters, National Front (FN) party honcho Marine Le Pen has seen detractors draw negative comparisons between her and extreme-right figures elsewhere in Europe—a notorious crowd including Dutch politician Geert Wilders, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, and Italian Gianfranco Fini before he shed his overt fascist trappings to gain more mainstream influence. But there's another well-known foreign politician blazing new trails on the rightist fringe of her country's political spectrum who Le Pen could also be measured against: American Tea Party darling Sarah Palin. Yet when asked about their similarities, Le Pen stiffens visibly and rejected resemblances to the Wasila dynamo leading the assault on the U.S. political establishment from a point that often appears beyond the border of traditional conservatism.

“I can not be compared with Madame Palin, and the National Front isn't similar to the Tea Party,” Le Pen told TIME recently, insisting that some of the positions Tea Partiers hold are, well, more extreme than her own, “You have to be honest: we have almost nothing in common with the Tea Party. The two political systems are very different, and (Palin's) positions reflect that.”

Think Palin should be razzed about Europe's hardest-charging, fastest-rising extreme-rightist figuring there's too much stigma involved in being likened to her closest American counter-part? You betcha.To be fair, however, were she aware of it, Palin herself probably wouldn't be any more thrilled with the comparison than Le Pen. After all, Palin is sufficiently careful in maintaining her aura of respectability that she'd be careful to avoid association with someone who—as Le Pen did in December--likens Muslims whose prayers spill into the streets when mosques overflow to Nazi occupation forces. And though arguably an extremists within the American political context, Palin has never tarred mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike with identical labels of corruption and treason to the nation the way Le Pen has all members of France's political mainstream.

Yet evident similarities exist. Both women and their parties want to seal off borders, halt immigration, and ruthlessly crack down hard on crime—including using capital punishment. They both want to protect jobs and businesses in their countries from foreign threats; champion a form of hard-edged nationalist exceptionalism that emphatically puts the interests of their own people and country above all others; and show bristling disdain for international organizations. Both also call followers to help return society to supposedly simpler, wholesome, traditional practices and values lost over time to alien influence, political malfeasance, and moral decay. Meanwhile, both have also proven masterful in using media to spread their political messages and advance their personal political ambitions. And—in a pinch—both women will cite reality-defying “facts” to support their arguments. And though their personal styles differ significantly, both women are smart and wily political animals with excellent instincts they use when laying verbal pile drivers on foes.

[NYC Liberal]

1. Palin, on top of being nuts, is also stupid.

The question is: is Marine Le Pen stupid too?

[somone]

2. Le Pen is only slightly less poisonous than her father