Jonah Goldberg points out some of the blatant hypocrisy’s in the DSK case. Does anyone recall Chappaquiddick?
by Jonah Goldberg
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has re signed as the head of the Interna tional Monetary Fund, after being charged with the sexual assault and attempted rape of an African-immigrant hotel maid.
“DSK,” as he’s known in France, is socialist royalty and was the presumed shoo-in to beat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential race.
I had planned on taking the easy route and mocking the debauched and depraved (im)morality of the French, the arrogant and asinine sophistry of DSK’s defenders, and the probability of his guilt.
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The gist of his brief: Who is this lowly woman to accuse a great man of such base acts? And how dare America’s courts take her accusations seriously when it’s her word against the great Strauss-Kahn’s? According to Levy, the New York judge should be ashamed because he “pretended to take [DSK] for a subject of justice like any other.” Translation: Do you Americans know who he is?
I hadn’t realized there was an escape clause at the end of the French motto: “Liberti, egalite, fraternite (for the little people)!”
[…]
I count myself blessed to live in a country where a poor maid from Guinea can have the head of the IMF dragged off a plane “simply” because she offered credible evidence she was sexually assaulted — but I’m not sure Americans should be congratulating themselves.
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But America is hardly so righteous. As blogger Will Collier notes, if you replaced “socialist” with “Democrat” in many of these stories, and “Dominique Strauss-Kahn” with “Ted Kennedy,” the results would be pretty illuminating.
After Chappaquiddick, the liberal establishment did its best to cover up a potential homicide by the “liberal lion.” It offered something close to a Gallic shrug when Sens. Kennedy and Chris Dodd made a “waitress sandwich” out of an unsuspecting restaurant server. And as Christopher Hitchens recalls in Slate, Teddy’s priapic brother John was such a “seducer” he imported “a Mafia gun-moll into the White House sleeping quarters.”
If memory serves, Bill Clinton had to deal with a large number of “bimbo eruptions,” as one of his aides put it. He was accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment. The same feminists who once insisted that women never make such things up were suddenly calling the president’s accusers liars or by simply abandoning the very standards they had established.
Gloria Steinem took to the pages of The New York Times to establish what has become known as the “one free grope” rule. Susan Faludi, author of the feminist bible “Backlash,” suddenly took a more laissez-faire attitude toward sexual aggression, requiring “nuanced” responses “in scale to the offense.” A reporter for Time magazine insisted she’d be happy to pleasure the president just for keeping abortion legal.
So yes, the French should be ashamed. But they’re not the only ones.
