Remember the six months before American troops invaded Iraq. The French and German secret services were claiming that no credible evidence existed to show that Saddam was close to producing nuclear weapons. Colin Powel, in what became a reputation destroying speech at the UN, claimed that the U.S. had precisely this smoking-gun kind of evidence.  After the speech, the French were not still convinced and blocked an U.N. vote that would have given U.N. approval for a U.S. military strike against Iraq. Some Americans were so upset by what they perceived to as unwarranted French obstinacy that they started to a movement to rename “French Fries” into “Freedom Fries.” Now more than three years after Bush launched the “Operation Iraqi Freedom” the French are vindicated and everybody in America is still calling French fries by their original name.

Will Ferrell and his co-author Adam McKay use this background to stage a fictitious French-American rivalry in the all-American NASCAR racing. Talladega Nights is a stupid movie, but unlike Ferrell’s and McKay’s previous comic effort, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) it is exceedingly funny. Talladega Nights also stars Ferrell as an accidental white-trash racing star who is challenged by a French Formula one driver (played exquisitely by Sasha Cohn of recent Borat fame). Talladega Nightsis is a movie by liberal Hollywood and it dumps gallons of thick satire onto the mores of the Bible Belt that brought the faith-based style of government in Washington. You can say what you want about the French, but they threw out this stuff with their revolution in 1789.