Being godless liberals, we naturally have no objection to people whose marriages have gone south on them seeking an escape route through divorce. Hell, sometimes we and our like-minded friends get married on slow weekends just so we can then get divorces and make the angels cry. So the news that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is divorcing his second wife, calling an end to their marriage of eleven years less than six months after he assumed stewardship of the Republic, moved us to nothing more dramatic than a sad shrug. We don't know how our conservative friends, the ones who care so much about how other people are handling their family values, are taking it, though. After all, in the wake of last year's midterms here at home and the continuing collapse of international respect for the Bush administration overseas, Sarkozy's election was greeted as a lonely ray of hope in a sky of inky blackness. Here, we were told by White House spokesmen and right wing editorial writers, was a new breed of French politician, a man who better reflected the values of conservative Americans, and whose election by a country full of beret-wearing surrender monkeys must be a sign that the universe was about to get with the program after all. But surely this is the kind of thing that smacks of the decadent European sophisticates of old, for whom our God-fearing American Republicans have expressed so much contempt. It has been reported that the soon-to-be former Madame Sarkozy didn't even bother to go to the polls to vote for her husband last May, which, if true, certainly puts Al Gore's much-criticized failure to carry his home state of Tennessee in some perspective. On the other hand, if Republican "values voters" can find it in themselves to remain unscandalized by the French leader's penchant for serial matrimony, that might be good practice for them if Rudy Giuliani grabs the presidential nomination.