Socialist French President Francois Hollande reportedly spends $11,000 per month for a personal barber. There’s only problem: Hollande doesn’t have much hair. In fact, a receding hairline has left him nearly bald on the front of his head.
Here’s what $11,000 a month buys you:
The outrageous spending spree was first reported by the investigate French paper Le Canard Enchainé earlier this week. As Fox News notes, $11,000-a-month is on par with the monthly salary of other cabinet ministers. “Per capita income in France is less than $3,500 a month,” adds Fox.
Deemed #Coiffeurgate on social media, the scandal was a topic of gossip in the French tabloids prior to the tragic Nice terrorist attack.
Yet, as France reels from the trauma of yet another Islamic murderous rampage, #Coiffeurgate raises many questions about the French administrative model.
The Hollande government is a Western socialist’s wet dream. With the French Socialist party in charge, the government collects exorbitant amounts of tax revenue to maintain its massive welfare state. All that money, however, isn’t creating the robust national security infrastructure that France urgently needs.
Coordination between intelligence services and domestic police forces is stunted at best. Citing a groundbreaking report released by the French parliament, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky marks the sheer extent of the French government’s shortcomings:
Apart from an objective threat the country faces thanks to its colonial past and a failure to integrate North African immigrants, it also suffers from inadequate policing…
As in the case of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, the French security services watched several of the terrorists who later committed the worst attacks of 2015 — such as the Kouachi brothers, who massacred the staff of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. They failed to put any surveillance on Amedy Coulibaly who took hostages in Paris directly after that attack. Samy Amimour, who last November fired into a crowd of concertgoers in Paris, had traveled to Syria, had been questioned and placed under administrative surveillance; but nothing was done after he missed several weekly checks in a row, and a lack of coordination between police and intelligence services made sure he wasn’t tracked. Another shooter from the Bataclan theater, Omar Mostefai, had been identified to the French authorities by Turkish intelligence as a dangerous radical. He wasn’t watched either.
The list goes on.
Modern socialist states are at war on several fronts. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s Chavismo government is fighting for dear life against a debilitating economic depression. In France, the battle is against the sceptre of radical jihad. Neither country has been able to locate solutions to these issues in the winding maze of bureaucracy.
And still, as incompetent as the Hollande government may be, it at least has the courage to identify the threat facing the West: Radical Islam.