Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as the head of the International Monetary Fund. He would like to spend more time with his family.
But that’s not why he resigned. He’d like to spend more time with his family, as opposed to potentially spending time with inmates, because he’s been charged with the sexual assault and attempted rape of an African-immigrant hotel maid.
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“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.
For instance, Bernard-Henri Levy, the open-shirted “philosopher-activist,” came out swinging, writing a defense of his friend for Tina Brown’s website, The Daily Beast (of course). His case for DSK was the sort of thing a French villain might say in a screwball comedy, it was so incandescently stupid and offensive.
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: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (for the little people)!”
“If I try transposing the situation in New York on Sunday to France, I just can’t do it,” a French diversity expert tells Time magazine. “Not only because the woman is black and apparently an immigrant. But also because she’s a housekeeper. Perhaps even more than her race, her station in society would probably prevent authorities (in France) from taking her accusations against a rich and powerful man seriously. Racism is on the rise here again, but class discrimination has never gone away.”
And while 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, I am not sure Americans should be congratulating themselves as much as they are.
Yes, the French deserve to be mocked. A clear majority of French citizens believe this is all a conspiracy. Yet every day, it becomes ever more clear that the French — particularly the French socialists who counted DSK as their leader — turned a blind eye to the man’s ever more risky and appalling behavior. According to mounting accounts, they wrote off assault as playful “seduction” or forgave it out of some kind of solidarity. (In one case an alleged DSK victim was talked out of pressing charges by her socialist-politician mother.)
And yes, the French Left’s attempt to turn this into a story of “American puritanism” run amok is beyond absurd. Strauss-Kahn was arrested after fleeing his Times Square hotel, not a mega-church in Alabama. And, last I checked, the NYPD Special Victims Unit was not a hotbed of Amish and Mennonites.
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. Ted 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. And the same feminists who once insisted that women never make such things up suddenly responded by calling the president’s accusers liars or by simply abandoning the very standards they had established.
Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and founder of Ms. Magazine, 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.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large ofNational Review Onlineand a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.
"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 couldn't help myself, Jonah. I shouted out loud: "He's John Kerry!"
Well written article Jonah, a truthful expose on the kettle calling the pot black.
I am proud that I live in a country where such a thing can happen for someone of such low stature against abusive elites, but I am also saddened that our justice system is not stronger than our political system. Guys like Bill Clinton and Teddy Kennedy are prime examples of that disparity. Still though, we are the greatest country in the world even if the bar keeps getting lowered.
Sadly, we must include John Ensign, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, and others from Republican and/or conservative ranks. Heard Sean Hannity on his radio program the other night pointing out that failures of character are non-partisan.
I take some comfort in observing that, contrary to the left's practice of circling the wagons around one of its own when accused, Republicans and/or conservatives are more likely to disown such offenders from within their ranks.
Did "John Ensign, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, and others from Republican and/or conservative ranks...." commit assaults or manslaughter?
I wish I could leave off the "others from Republican and/or conservative ranks," because of course criminals come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and political philosophies.
However, I was really struck by the three you mentioned because their behaviors were so different for the types of Jonah mentioned. Now if you had mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was previously accused in the LA Times of harassment, I would not have commented at all.
Ellen is right: Sanford had a consensual affair. Craig's behavior was creepy, but didn't rise to the level of what DSK, Kennedy, and Clinton were accused of. Don't know enough about Ensign to comment.
The closest analogy I can think of on the right was the Catholic priest molestation scandal. Even there, some Conservatives defended the Church as a whole, but I don't remember anyone saying that the individual priests should be allowed to molest kids because they do so much good in other areas.
Always love your column, but don't quite get the point this time. It was Chappaquidick (or however you spell it) that probably closed the doors to the White House forever on Ted K. True, he kept going back to the Senate, but that was because of Massachusetts, not America at large. JFK's exploits were largely kept secret from the press, popular wisdom on this topic notwithstanding. Those the press new about, they covered up, precisely because they knew America at large wouldn't tolerate them. If your point is simply that America has an important subset of its population that thinks much like the French are thinking now, well, heck yeah. But if that's all you want to say, then I don't understand the statement, "But America is hardly so righteous."
I think Jonah's point is that Liberals and their water-carriers in the media do their best to allow people like Ted K and Bill C to survive their moral lapses. These people hold their Liberal Standard Bearers to a different...erm...standard.
Ensign, Craig and Sanford never received such treatment. As soon as their transgressions were made public, they were cut loose as so much dead weight.
As many noted, Americans are no less prone to sinning. But Jonah seems to be criticizing the fact that, for some classes, that sinning is tolerated. Which is a shame.
I think it's a stretch to say Clinton was given a free pass by the media. Remember your history:
"The prestige of the presidency and America's status worldwide appeared to suffer as a now-humiliated Clinton was endlessly mocked by everyone from late-night TV comedians to average people on the street. By now, 78 U.S. newspapers, including USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and Detroit Free Press, had called on Clinton to resign. Numerous other papers, including The New York Times and Washington Post, denounced his conduct in their editorial pages but stopped short of calling for his resignation or impeachment."
Aragorn: The fact that, in the end, the media abandoned Clinton, does not excuse the fact that for 30 years prior, they felt that none of these stories were worth pursuing.
But you just don't understand French culture. DSL is a hero in France. Much like Jerry Lewis. The average male in France aspires to achieve what DSL had in his illustrious career. Yes, we shrug and utter a collective, "cest la vie!"
Re: the perp walk - it beats a tumbril ride to the guillotine, every time!
In Oregon, former Governor Neil Goldschmidt's may years of abuse of a minor girl (which he called "an affair" in the newspaper) was overlooked by all the lefty power brokers who knew what was happening because he "did so much good" for the state. When the poor woman died recently, more details were finally released to the public. The whole story is shocking in its callous disregard for the ruined life of a young girl.
So, indeed, the US has nothing to be proud of when it comes to our politicians.
On the right, I demand that our elected officials hold themselves to a higher standard. They may fail to always live up to that standard, but having a moral standard is imperative.
The left's standard seems to be "Anything goes; at least we're not hypocrites."
I'll try again. I think I used an unfortunate word in my first attempt. Anyway,here goes.
Regarding feminists' tolerance of the imprudent behavior of liberal males:
Bill Clinton defined the women's movement.
1) It does not apply to homely southern white women and,
2) As long as you are pro abortion it is okay to "exploit" young women in the Oval office.
Have a pleasant weekend.
I think many of us shudder with impotent rage when we watch pundits defend the indefensible and smear the victim, but power, even just pundit power by association and influence, corrupts. But it is, curiously, one-sided, I haven't seen any right-leaning defenses of Ahnold.
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