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# Posted 9:40 AM by Patrick Belton

PARIS, CAPITAL OF FREEDOM: Today in the capital of Freedom (well, that would be the logical result of doing a massive cultural search-and-replace, converting "France" and "French" into "Freedom," wouldn't it?), a Frenchman named Thierry Meyssan took moral umbrage at the much-publicized deck of cards presenting ex-tyrant Saddam and his sub-thugs as the jokers they were. Said deck of cards had, of course, an illustrious lineage dating back to the Allies' efforts in WWII, but then again, come to think of it, the French weren't too much in favour of that, either. Thus Monsieur Meyssan: "I found it completely indecent to present a manhunt as a game." So he came up with his own deck, with members of the Bush administration prominently displayed therein. "We thought this card game would allow us to ... explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security."

M. Meyssan's seizure of the moral high ground, however, gets a little shaky when we remember that in a kooky book called 9-11: The Big Lie, he claimed that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, and that the attacks were plotted by a faction within the U.S. military. What's even more troubling is that his book was a best-seller in France (sorry, I meant Freedom).

As with culture, music, and revolutions, of course, Moscow's destiny has generally been to copy Paris, so we can now also buy a deck na-pycckii from Kommersant. Which, incidentally, attempted to take the high road with its. "We want to show our readers the various faces of the current U.S. political elite,...that it is a complex, living organism with varied and vivid personalities," said Azer Mursaliyev, foreign editor of the business daily Kommersant, which designed the cards. Danyet. Gimme a break.

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