I have always viewed the anti French tone of the Bush era with great annoyance.
Despite the fact of their defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940, remember that the French DID declare war on Germany in 1939. The US did not enter WW II, despite FDR's best efforts, until attacked by Japan. Even then it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way round.
The US army did not do too well (like everybody else) in it's first encounter with the German Army, either. If the French had the time and space to learn how to fight the new style of warfare, then maybe 1940 would have been different.
There wasn't a "new style" of warfare in 1940, not really. The Germans were doing what they had always done - critical mass (schwerpunkt), the encirclement, and the battle of annihilation, married with principles the British Army had mastered in 1918. The French did have some mechanized infantry in 1940, also, with halftracks (the DLC regiment/divisions) and were remarkably modern if one looks at their org structure, but as is well known, they frittered away their tanks and mech infantry into small packets. Their communications were abominable, running IIRC entire corps through single switchboards.
Still, the DLC had high quality soldiers and maintained their combat effectiveness longer than the French line infantry - wasn't enough to stop the breakthrough in the Ardennes, but there were a few bumps along the way for the Germans. Stonne was another famous one that ASL players are familiar with. The French were not completely clueless about how to organize and fight in the "new world order", they just needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into it - a little too little, and a lot too late. There were young advocates of the tank - de Gaulle for one - in the peacetime army in France, just as there were in every modern country in the world, but they weren't able to convince the older establishment figures to let them have their way.
But that's ok, it was the same way in Germany, too - Hitler refused to let the panzer commanders run roughshod in Poland and France - and especially at Dunkirk - and even the oh-so-vaunted Germans were still hidebound to tradition and a need to protect their flanks at the same time the French were second-guessing their commitment to the Maginot Line (not hard to do with German tanks a 100 miles inside of it).
The Germans didn't win because they outfoxed everyone with a lot of razzle-dazzle and secret new tactics. They were just really good, and ultimately, the French and British were, unfortunately for them, really bad at what they tried to accomplish. It doesn't take away from their bravery or from the very real tactical victories that many field formations managed to wrest during the six weeks of fighting. It is a testament, I think, to the cost of unpreparedness in peacetime - a lesson we in the democracies keep dooming ourselves to repeating, willingly.
