"There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During
a break one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?' A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck.. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?'"
BUT, in the interests of accuracy and fairness, and to be sure that a good response is qualified and fact checked until it is no longer so worth repeating, I have discovered the truth! He was a little off on his stats. A Nimitz class carrier has more foodservice, less hospital and more water capability than he said. France does have a carrier, though it is not one of the "such ships" referred to, so the engineer is right. Here it is in comparison the the Eisenhower. Guess which is the bigger one? But seriously, the source of this rebuttal comes from Snopes, in a forum thread full of dirty hippie types. They don't even realize that French bashing did not originate with the War in Iraq, but really got going when the French refused to allow US planes to overfly its airspace when Reagan sent a mission to bomb Quadafy into submission. Which worked, and benefited the French. Or maybe it comes from the embarrassingly incompetent and cowardly performance of the Third empire leading up to and encouraging WWII to get on a roll, or maybe it was later, the traitorous Petain puppet regime that sent hundred of thousands of Jews and others to the concentration camps from France? But now, we really should reassess this all. President Sarkozy may be more conservative and better at governing his country than our next president. Even if it is a rather small county. Or could jealousy be at the root of French bashing? In what bakery can you find bread like you can in every French hamlet? Or where can you find good table wine here for about $2 a bottle. And how many great cheeses does the average US county produce? There is much to be said for this Texas sized vacation resort. So lets cut them a break. Unless they pipe up again with the stupid, irrelevant, pious criticism that emanates from Paris every now and again.
Proud to be an American!
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