A Liberal Explains French Nuttiness

Inspector Clouseau

Zut Alors! One of the New York Times’ liberal columnists, Roger Cohen, explains why the French are nuts : a culture of dependency:

After Osama bin Laden was killed, a prominent French radio station called me for an interview. It turned into a mildly hallucinogenic experience. Everybody from the president of the United States to Al Qaeda itself was saying Bin Laden was dead, but my interviewer kept pressing me for “the proof.”

I talked about DNA samples, the word of the American president, the accumulated intelligence, but it was clear that a Gallic conspiracy reflex — especially active with regard to France’s sometime American savior — had kicked in. The view that this might all be some U.S. plot or hoax had taken mysterious hold.

I was put in mind of an unpleasant Paris dinner when a France Télécom manager with international experience began to expound on the theory — more than plausible to his mind — that Jews had not turned up to work at the twin towers on 9/11 because Israel and the Mossad were behind the planes-turned-missiles that turned lower Manhattan into an inferno.

And now we have the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case, viewed, it seems, by close to 60 percent of French society as a conspiracy against the putative Socialist presidential candidate — a sting operation that somehow placed a West African immigrant maid in a $3,000 a night Sofitel suite whose number, 2806, corresponds to the date of the opening of the Socialist party primaries in France (06-28).

Oh, s’il vous please!

A rough rule goes like this: The freer a society the less inclined it is to conspiracy theories, while the greater its culture of dependency the more it will tend to see hidden hands at work everywhere.

France remains a nation of Napoleonic centralism where the functionary’s mentality holds sway. The ingrained reflex of that mind-set is to look to the state for salvation, to believe in some all-orchestrating higher power.

The nation’s world-class private sector, believers in agency rather than dependency, follows the old principle of “vivre heureux, vivre caché” — to live happily, live hidden — and thereby allows the functionary’s order to prevail as reference point. In this view, personal responsibility does not loom large.

Countless Franco-American differences of culture have been highlighted by the DSK case — in the judicial system, the press, attitudes to public figures’ private lives, sex and the gravity of a rape charge — but a very fundamental one lies in the relation to authority. French deference to power — with the accompanying conspiracy theories — has encountered the hard-knuckled application of U.S. law as applied equally to anyone accused of a serious crime…

Run, Rudy, Run

The media, both right and left, are shocked and speechless that Rudy Giuliani, who hasn’t even announced that he would run for president, is leading all the other Republican candidates, according to a CNN poll.

I’m delighted Rudy may get in the race. I was for him in 2008 and I’d vote for him in 2012 if given the opportunity.

Why? He’s the only American politician on any level since perhaps Reagan (and Truman before that) who can point to a real, tangible achievement: the salvation of America’s greatest city which, before his tenure as mayor, was on the way to becoming what Detroit is today.

I spend a lot of time in New York, and I particularly love Central Park which I think is one of the jewels of Western civilization. I remember what the park was before Rudy – a place you entered at your peril. Vagrant lunatics and criminals looking for prey owned Central Park in those days, but not today. They owned the subway and the streets as well, but not today. The current mayor is merely resting on Rudy’s laurels in my opinion.

How did he do it? New Yorkers and visitors can thank Rudy for standing up to the most aggressive bunch of liberal activists in Christendom. He stared them down and they blinked; thus, he was re-elected by probably the most dedicated Democratic electorate in the country.

He bungled the last election’s GOP primaries by not campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and putting all his eggs in the Florida basket.

Perhaps he’s too liberal for Republican primary voters on social issues like gays and abortion, but I don’t think 2008 proved anything about his electability. So Run, Rudy, Run!

Speaking of New York, former schools’ chancellor and educational “miracle worker” Joel Klein and the credulous fools who believe his claims of having turned the schools around need to be held accountable (but won’t) for the following:

The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools — and they claim principals are the culprits.

The reports are responding to my column that many schools are denying students the freedom to fail in a misguided bid to help them. To judge from the response, the problem is worse than I feared. Much worse.

First, a professional in a Manhattan high school wrote to say that teachers in her school are “encouraged” to pass 80 percent of students, no matter their grades or attendance. She offered student writing samples filled with glaring errors of spelling and grammar to prove that “social promotion is alive and well.”

Now others are revealing shocking examples from their schools about how unprepared kids are being pushed along to the next grade and out the door with a sham diploma. Their disheartening tales deserve attention.

“Our mandated passing rate is 60 percent,” one wrote. “We need to explain in detail why this student failed, what methods were used to get him to pass, how much home contact was made.

“The one group that is not called in for interrogation is the students themselves. No blame falls on them . . . The students know what is going on. It has empowered them to feel that they can work less or not at all and still pass the class.”

Another, from a Brooklyn high school, says the principal fudges attendance and grades with a warning that unless the school improves, the Department of Education will close it and teachers will lose their jobs.

“The administration allows students to run around, go to class for 5 minutes, and we must mark them present,” he wrote. “We are also encouraged to change attendance of students marked absent up to 2 weeks earlier, looking for ‘proof’ they are absent. So teachers just give up and mark them present.”

He added, “Teachers are scared into passing students that do not deserve it.”…

There’s a lot more. Read the entire column and weep. Another bi-partisan pipe dream up in smoke. But one thing is for sure: They will never admit they were wrong.

Short Jew – 3. Arrogant, Professorial President – 0.

Glenn McCoy

Ok, I added the “short” part for obvious reasons. It turns out Netanyahu’s 6 feet tall. But I can’t resist the following from presidential historian Walter Russell Mead:

[Obama's] record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat—Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties—may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla—or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.

The last time Netanyahu met with Obama, someone in the administration leaked that Obama considers Netanyahu not to be too smart. Of course, liberals think that, by definition, a non-liberal cannot be smart, and we all know that no one is, or ever was, as smart as Obama. Still, will the administration re-set its assessment of Bibi’s smarts?

I know that Congress’s response to Netanyahu is being portrayed by the leftist intelligentsia (including many if not most Jews) as motivated by fear of losing Jewish voters and money, but I don’t think so. Republicans get few Jewish votes and little Jewish money. Rather the response from politicians, I believe, is because the pro-Israel argument is an amazingly compelling one for ordinary people, if not for members of the “educated class, who reflexively reject the obvious.

Ordinary folks see Israel as a tiny country with a handful of Jews surrounded by millions of Arabs and Muslims, many of whom are fabulously rich from oil, living on vast expanses of land, and yet, they cannot tolerate this little country in their midst. These ordinary folks also understand that Israel repeatedly defeated their fanatical enemies who simply cannot accept defeat.

Most Americans know that when you lose, you don’t get the parade down the Champs Elysees or Broadway. Most Americans like winners who, against all odds, defeat an aggressor. But to intellectuals, that’s a simplistic a way of thinking, not worthy of an educated person.

Why do intellectuals hate Israel and love the Arabs?

Here’s my analysis:

1. Israelis and Jews in general are successful. Intellectuals don’t like success, particularly if it comes from military skill or results in somebody getting rich. Intellectuals affect to love the unsuccessful (read: victims of discrimination).

2. Israelis are bourgeois (Hey, I’m talkin’ French!), middle class and, worst of all, familiar. In other words, Jews are similar to intellectuals themselves, that is, “white” and prosperous . Familiarity, as someone once said, breeds contempt; thus, intellectuals hate their countries, their culture (and themselves) whom they blame for all of the world’s sins: capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia…

3. Arabs and Muslims, on the other hand, are not “white” (by contemporary definition) and are definitely not familiar. Arabs and Muslims are exotic, far out, and thus romantic, so they are powerfully attractive to intellectuals. This exoticism and non-whiteness excuses, in the intellectuals’ nuanced thinking, the Muslims’ historic militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Don’t ask: You have to be an intellectual.

This is why intellectuals love Obama and hate Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s argument is readily understandable to ordinary people, i.e., most Americans, and so Congress has to, because it’s made up of politicians, respond to what they know to be the opinion of the regular folks who vote for them. These benighted folks who, someone once said, “cling to their guns and religion,” just don’t get Professor Obama’s exegesis, poor things.

Thou Shalt Not Dis’ Our Dear Leader

Brent Bozell on the media’s outrage over Netanyahu’s blasphemous chutzpah in daring to lecture our president:

…Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine (and website) posted an item on May 20 headlined: “Dear Mr. Netanyahu, Please Don’t Speak to My President That Way.” Netanyahu, he wrote, threw a “hissy fit.” That pretty much encapsulated the American media’s reaction. “Cowboy diplomacy” is just fine from time to time — if the man in the saddle is Obama.

On that night’s “NBC Nightly News,” reporter Andrea Mitchell was finding anonymous distaste for Netanyahu from other Israeli officials, never mind that his country was unquestionably applauding him.

“I was told that even some Israeli officials, David, were uncomfortable with what they acknowledge was a lecturing tone by the prime minister. But he felt very strongly he had to say this to the world, to President Obama’s face.”

By the time Sunday’s “Meet the Press” rolled around, Mitchell heightened the attack on Netanyahu for daring to lecture the Almighty Barack.

“Netanyahu seized on it. Even before he got on the plane, he criticized the president, and in such a fashion! He lectured him in the Oval Office. And if you look at that picture that you have up there right now, it was a stone-faced Barack Obama and Netanyahu basically treating him like a schoolboy.”

And then, some more anonymity: “People even who work for Netanyahu, some Israeli officials, told him later that he went too far. That it was, it was really rude and that there would be blowback to this.”

Mitchell’s NBC sure was less outraged when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez came to the U.N. in 2006 and denounced President Bush as a devil.

Kelly O’Donnell was downright blase: “Chavez repeatedly called the president ‘a devil’ and labeled him a ‘Yankee terrorist.’ The administration quickly dismissed the swipe. … And some say that the Venezuelan president cannot be so easily ignored because he has so much oil.”…

Jessica St. Clair added: “He’s saying what everybody wants to say, and so now we love him.”

Thanks, NBC, for always standing up for our president, regardless of party.

How about when that idiot Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President Bush’s head in December 2008, screaming, “This is your goodbye (present), you dog”? On NBC’s “Today,” reporter Richard Engel excused the shoe-tosser because he had relatives killed in Baghdad.

Reporter Chuck Todd went further, virtually endorsing the Bush insult, saying that “in our last poll we had 80 percent said they wouldn’t miss him,” and “He’s already being sort of kicked out of office by the American people.”

The other networks were even worse. ABC’s “World News” put “Folk Hero?” on screen as anchor Elizabeth Vargas trumpeted this “instant celebrity to many of his countrymen.” Then-employed and more perky CBS anchor Katie Couric hailed how “many Iraqis are calling him a hero.” Reporter Elizabeth Palmer snidely concluded the man “should do jail time, said the Iraqi bloggers, because he missed.”

Did anyone disagree with Obama’s position on Israel? Apparently not, if we are to trust the press. None of the network morning shows found critics of Obama’s remarks on Israel. CBS’s “Early Show” instead turned to former Clinton State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin.

Anchor Erica Hill suggested Netanyahu couldn’t “give an inch” politically to the president on Israeli security. Rubin replied: “This is unfortunate for everyone, I think. Because President Obama doesn’t have the huge popularity in Israel that, perhaps, President Bush had, it’s easier for Prime Minister Netanyahu to have a fight with him.”

CBS’s liberal guest insisted it was “unfortunate for everyone” that Obama wasn’t more popular in Israel, with the clear implication that he should be. Our media feel Obama’s pain so intensely that they can’t bear the thought that someone would say an unkind word to him, especially with their cameras rolling. Their outrage at Netanyahu is only a small indicator of how much they’re going to hate Obama’s Republican opponents in the months to come.

And Shelby Steele goes further than Bozell in identifying the real source of Obama idolatry (Hint: It’s not his astounding brilliance nor his alleged “eloquence.”):

Many of the Republican presidential hopefuls should be able to beat President Obama in 2012. This president has a track record now and, thus, many vulnerabilities. If he is not our “worst president,” as Donald Trump would have it, his sweeping domestic initiatives—especially his stimulus package and health-care reform—were so jerry-built and high-handed that they generated a virtual revolution in America’s normally subdued middle class.

The president’s success in having Osama bin Laden killed is an exception to a pattern of excruciatingly humble and hesitant leadership abroad…

And yet Republicans everywhere ask, “Who do we have to beat him?” In head-to-head matchups, Mr. Obama beats all of the Republican hopefuls in most polls.

The problem Mr. Obama poses for Republicans is that there has always been a disconnect between his actual performance and his appeal. If Hurricane Katrina irretrievably stained George W. Bush, the BP oil spill left no lasting mark on this president. Mr. Obama’s utter confusion in the face of the “Arab spring” has nudged his job-approval numbers down, but not his likability numbers, which Gallup has at a respectable 47.6%. In the mainstream media there has been a willingness to forgive this president his mistakes, to see him as an innocent in an impossible world. Why?

There have really always been two Barack Obamas: the mortal man and the cultural icon. If the actual man is distinctly ordinary, even a little flat and humorless, the cultural icon is quite extraordinary. The problem for Republicans is that they must run against both the man and the myth. In 2008, few knew the man and Republicans were walloped by the myth. Today the man is much clearer, and yet the myth remains compelling.

What gives Mr. Obama a cultural charisma that most Republicans cannot have? First, he represents a truly inspiring American exceptionalism: He is the first black in the entire history of Western civilization to lead a Western nation—and the most powerful nation in the world at that. And so not only is he the most powerful black man in recorded history, but he reached this apex only through the good offices of the great American democracy.

Thus his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it.

He is also an extraordinary personification of the American Dream: Even someone from a race associated with slavery can rise to the presidency. Whatever disenchantment may surround the man, there is a distinct national pride in having elected him.

All of this adds up to a powerful racial impressionism that works against today’s field of Republican candidates. This is the impressionism that framed Sen. John McCain in 2008 as a political and cultural redundancy—yet another older white male presuming to lead the nation.

The point is that anyone who runs against Mr. Obama will be seen through the filter of this racial impressionism, in which white skin is redundant and dark skin is fresh and exceptional. This is the new cultural charisma that the president has introduced into American politics…

During the last presidential campaign, I speculated that the media’s apotheosis of Obama (and to an extent, Hillary) would make it much more difficult for a bright, articulate white guy ever to get elected president again because the media would implicitly (if not explicitly) portray such a candidate as a “return to our racist, sexist past.” And forget about nominating a woman. To liberals, a Republican woman is a contradiction in terms. Remember when Gloria Steinhem called Margaret Thatcher a “female impersonator”?

Clearly, this is why so few white guys are willing to take on Obama’s “cultural charisma” despite his almost completely undistinguished performance. Some have noted that no president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment number of 8% or higher. Obama has a good chance of being the first since FDR, and if he does win re-election despite high unemployment, he can thank his race.

Ironic, isn’t it?

It’s Complicated, Stupid!

Glenn Foden

I’m not sure whether the brilliant insights quoted below are from James Fallows, reputedly a really smart person (After all, he was once a speech writer for Jimmy Carter) or Jeffrey Goldberg,The Atlantic’s resident deep thinker on Middle East issues. One or the other analyzes Obama’s Middle East policy with such incredible nuance only a French semioticologist (or proctologist?) could possibly decipher it.

My translation: Trust Le Professeur Obama. It’s too complicated for you ordinary rubes:

…It’s complicated[My comment: Voden?]. We should no longer be surprised that a major Obama speech on an important topic is characterized mainly by its embrace of complexity. Here’s why this matters:

Traditionally the role of a Presidential speech is to say, in bald terms, which side of an issue the Administration is coming down on. Are we going to war, or not? Is the president going to sign a bill, or veto it? People outside the government underestimate how important big presidential speeches are in resolving policy arguments and deciding what an administration’s approach will be.

Obama’s big speeches have been unusual, because the side they come down on is that of complexity[ My comment: Yes, he's that brilliant]. In his classic [My emphasis] Philadelphia “race in America” speech [My comment: Yes, I forgot; a greater speech than the Gettysburg Address, according big shot professor Garry Wills]: the recognition that every part of our racial mix has its insecurities and blind spots. In his Nobel prize address: that military force is not the answer but is an answer. In his West Point speech a year and a half ago: that the U.S. can’t stay in Afghanistan forever but should stay for a while. You can apply this analysis to almost every major address.

Including these latest speeches. He argued that the United States has “interests” in the Middle East — oil, stability, anti-terrorism — and it also has ideals. So it will try harder to advance its ideals, without pretending it has no (often contradictory) interests. He presented Israel-Palestine in this same perspective. As a meta-point, he said that Israel-Palestine is only part of the larger Arab-world evolution, but is a crucial part. On the merits, he emphasized that Israel has to be secure, that Hamas must accept that reality, that Israel must be able to defend itself — but that it cannot stand pat, wait too long to strike a deal, or forever occupy the West Bank.

My point here is about Obama rather than about the Middle East. From some politicians, for instance those otherwise dissimilar Georgians Jimmy Carter and Newt Gingrich, a collection of “complex” ideas often comes across as just a list. Obama, most of the time, has pulled off the trick of making his balance-of-contradictions seem a policy in itself. Rather than seeming just “contradictory” or “indecisive.” This is unusual enough that it’s worth noting… [My tentative translation: Obama's even smarter than Carter and Gingrich put together?]

WTF?!!!!!

Earth To Arabs: You Lost…Move On

Michael Ramirez

While scholars, Talmudic and otherwise, attempt to discern Barack Obama’s true intentions towards Israel, I would like to suggest the kind of speech the president should give if he really wants to restart peace talks with an out-of-the-box jolt.

He might start by quoting the late philosopher Eric Hoffer, as Dave M. O’Neill did in a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

…The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands of people, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen . . . and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. . . . Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.”

After that, Obama might continue thusly:

Here is an inconvenient truth for you: You have never won a war or battle against the Israelis. Ever hear of the line, “To the victor go the spoils”? You have never been the victor, thus you are losers. And losers don’t get to dictate the terms of what happens after the violence ends. You especially don’t get to do so when you started it in the first place.

Take the American Civil War. The Union Army burned, sacked and pillaged what was then the Confederacy. Forced to surrender, Southerners were, from then on, dependent on the kindness of Northerners.

The Japanese and Germans had no say in what their future would be like at the end of World War II. In fact Germany and Japan are still “occupied” by Americans. Once it became obvious that they had been defeated (as opposed to being betrayed by imaginary “rootless cosmopolitans” like the Jews), they took a collective deep breath and, as we say nowadays, moved on.

Imagine: two of the most militaristic peoples in human history became pacifists. Try nowadays to get a German or Japanese to pick up a gun to defend himself, let alone to conquer the world. They are perfectly content to let us Americans defend them while they make BMWs, Birkenstocks, televisions and cameras. Why? They realized after being decisively defeated that militarism wouldn’t be working for them, “going forward.” In other words: They learned their lesson.

Somehow you and your supporters among the left-wing Western intelligentsia (who love to make a fetish of losers) have managed to make your situation into one of the great moral issues of modern times: the poor, suffering Palestinians – eternal victims of those power-hungry, rapacious Jews.

So if you really want peace, you’re gonna have to prove it. Here’s the program you all need to get with:

1. Lose the “right of return” fantasy. It just isn’t going to happen.

2. Forget about the 1967 borders. Not going to happen either.

3. Stop the incitement. No more streets and squares in Ramallah named after suicide bombers. Stop talking out of both sides of the mouth, saying nice things in English while preaching violence in Arabic.

4. Forget the unity government with Hamas. Israel will never talk to Hamas.

There is more, but the bottom line is this: You have got to start behaving like the losers you indubitably are. Being a loser isn’t so bad. Just ask the Germans.

So take the best deal you can get from the guys who whipped your asses on multiple occasions and for heaven’s sake… Move On!

Obama Need Not Fear The Jews

Barak - accepted plan based on '67 borders

Olmert - also accepted '67 borders plan

Mark Steyn on Obama’s Cairo, Part 2 speech:

…[You] have two parties to a negotiation, one party wants to kill the other party…That’s why there was no peace in 1948, no peace under the British mandate in the 1930s, no peace at the time of the 1922 partition because one party to the dispute wants to kill the other. So, if they are wedded to that, then you got to put pressure on the party that doesn’t want to kill the other, to make concession – to keep throwing concessions in the face of the beast that wants to devour it and I think that’s – if you look at where [Obama's] applying the pressure, I think that tells you a lot about the fundamental fraudulence of these negotiations.

Obama’s “changing the status quo” assertion that negotiations should resume with the 1967 borders as a starting point is a big concession to the Arabs since Arafat rejected that plan at the end of the Clinton administration, and his supposedly more compliant successor rejected a similar plan put forth by Ehud Olmert during the Bush administration.

From a news report at the time:

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that during his tenure he offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an unprecedented peace offer, based on a return to the 1967 borders and a fair demographic land arrangement which would see heavily Jewish areas in the West Bank remain under Israeli control.

“I offered a land swap, I offered a solution for Jerusalem, where the Jewish part would remain under Israeli authority and the Arab sections would be given to the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state,” he told a conference at Tel Aviv University.

Why doesn’t Obama demand that the Arabs give up the “right of return” of Arabs to pre-1967 Israel as a starting point for negotiations? Every sentient observer knows (even if some won’t publicly admit it) that such a thing would result in the end of Israel as a Jewish state and almost certainly the violent end of Israelis themselves. No one believes Israel would ever willingly agree to a “right to return,” so why not get it off the table right now?

Obama seems to have a compulsion to tilt the playing field toward the Arabs, despite reports that some Jewish Democrats (almost a redundancy) are warning Obama not to be too hard on Israel if he doesn’t want to lose Jewish votes (and money).

I suspect that Obama and the Democrats believe, with a good deal of justification, that all but a few renegade members of the American Jewish herd are emotionally incapable of voting for a Republican.

Short, Left-Wing Men Gone Wild

One short, grand seducteur,

Another short, left-wing miscreant

La Coulter defines “le grand seducteur”:

…Only in Hollywood movies are handsome lacrosse players from nice families seen as likely rapists. In real life, they look more like the 5-foot-2-inch Roman Polanski or pudgy, unathletic Bill Clinton — or the homunculus 5-foot-2-inch Strauss-Kahn (My comment: Hey Ann, lighten up on us unfortunate members members of the short, pudgy community. And don’t forget: Besides having to endure being short and pudgy, Polanski and Strauss-Kahn bear the added burden of being Jewish. However, I won’t defend President Bubba.).

But, it is argued, how could Strauss-Kahn possibly think he could get away with the violent rape of a chambermaid in a $3,000-a-night hotel room, booked in his name?

First of all, Strauss-Kahn has evidently gotten away with treating the fairer sex as his playthings for some time. No wonder his nickname among the French is “le grand seducteur,” which I believe roughly translates to “the short, tubby serial rapist.”

The New York Times reports that as far back as 2007, Brussels journalist Jean Quatremer remarked on Strauss-Kahn’s troubled behavior — “close to harassment” — toward women, saying the press knew all about it, but never mentioned it because “we are in France.”

When Strauss-Kahn was appointed to the I.M.F., Quatremer sardonically warned that the international institution was not the same as France, but instead had “Anglo-Saxon morals.”

Second, it’s not unheard of that a wealthy liberal would assume the law does not apply to him. Actually, let me restate that: Wealthy liberals always assume that laws don’t apply to them. After all the waivers the Obama administration has been dishing out like candy, are there any liberals left to whom Obamacare will apply?

We might also ask how a governor of New York could think he could get away with hiring prostitutes to service him in similarly pricey hotels, bringing them across state lines, and using his friend’s names to book the girls, year after year.

But Eliot Spitzer thought he could get away with that. Fortunately he has been brought to justice and sentenced to hosting a lame show on CNN…

[Out] of Southern California we have Roman Polanski, the legendary director of two good movies and about a hundred unbelievably horrible ones, who drugged and anally raped an underage girl, according to the police report.

Not only did Polanski think he could get away with it, he did get away with it by fleeing the country (to France) when he discovered, to his shock and dismay, that in America, a person can actually be sentenced to prison for drugging and raping a 13-year-old. That was in 1977. He has never been brought to justice.

Liberals supported Polanski’s evasion of punishment for child rape, with the Hollywood left denouncing his arrest in Switzerland a couple of years ago, howling that he had suffered enough! Wasn’t he prevented from coming to the U.S. to pick up his Oscar in 2003?…

[British Historian Paul ]Johnson writes [in his book The Intellectuals] that the pint-sized — 5 foot 2 1/2 inch — communist-sympathizing [Jean Paul] Sartre “was notorious for never taking a bath and being disgustingly dirty.” He said admiringly of the Nazis, “We have never been as free as we were under the German occupation.”

The flyweight Sartre famously turned Simone de Beauvoir into his “mistress, surrogate wife, cook and manager, female bodyguard and nurse.” (Sadly, she never learned how to give someone a sponge bath.) All the while, the smelly midget committed a stream of infidelities, viewing women “as scalps to add to his centaur’s belt.”

In “the annals of literature,” Johnson writes, “there are few worse cases of a man exploiting a woman.”

As he got older, Sartre’s sexual conquests got younger, including teenaged girls.

Like Spitzer…and Polanski, liberal men seem driven by their massive insecurities (often based on physical defects, such as their diminutive size or soap allergies) to choose unconscious, illiterate, servant-class and teenage females as their sex partners. But let’s not drag pocket-sized Woody Allen’s name into this, as my column appears in many family newspapers.

Karl Marx kept a female slave from the time she was 8 years old, eventually using her not only as a servant but as his mistress, never acknowledging his child with her or paying her at all. She waited on him hand and foot while he explained to the world that profit is the stolen surplus value of the laborer. Like so many liberal icons, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty…

[No] wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs…

L’Horreur! True Democracy

Before

A blogger who calls herself neo-neocon on the French reaction to the NYPD’s treatment of one of their grandees:

After

…The French do not appear to relish seeing the mighty brought low. As Con Coughlin, executive foreign editor of the British Telegraph, observes:

“Any attempt by a French policeman to handcuff a prominent politician would be tantamount to committing an act of treason. In America it doesn’t matter whether you are OJ Simpson or an international statesman of the stature of Mr. Strauss Kahn: if the cops believe you’ve broken the law, you’ll soon find yourself paraded in public in handcuffs before being thrown in the slammer.”

Actually, it does matter who the perp is in America, but not quite in the way Coughlin meant it. The fact is that the perp walk is more likely, not less, to be foisted on the rich and famous, and particularly on white collar criminals…

In Strauss-Kahn’s case, the handcuffs and the police guard were theater, but they were not solely for show. Strauss-Kahn may be a white-collar type, but the offense with which he has been charged is most definitely not a white-collar crime. As described, it was an act of violence. What’s more, his conduct afterward made it clear that a good argument could be made that he is a substantial flight risk — literally, because the police apprehended him on an Air France plane that was only moments from taking off.

The flight risk is not only obvious in Strauss-Kahn’s case, but it is not a small matter, and was the main reason he was denied bail. If the police had been just a little slower in getting to the airport, and Strauss-Kahn had been able to depart for France, he would most likely have been beyond the reach of American law because France would almost certainly have refused to extradite him.

Precedent is the well-known Roman Polanski case, in which another celebrity accused of sex crimes in the U.S. fled to France and remained free thereafter for over 30 years. When Polanski was finally arrested in Switzerland in 2009, the reaction of a large part of France and Europe was horror at those vindictive boors, the Americans:

“To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event honoring him — is absolutely horrifying,” French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said after Polanski was arrested upon arrival in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award. “There’s an America we love and an America that scares us, and it’s that latter America that has just shown us its face.”

However, not everyone dislikes this particular side of the American visage. Richard Fernandez points out that some non-European observers seem to take satisfaction in how Strauss-Kahn was treated:

If you go down to the Times of India you will read comment after comment that says “only in America could such a powerful man be taken off an airplane and made to parade in a police lineup”; “this is true democracy” and “my faith in the world has been restored.” For a world that is accustomed to watching the powerful stamp on the faces of the common man, this … arrest is … almost unbelievable.

If Strauss-Kahn is ultimately found not guilty, the perp walk naysayers will feel even more vindicated in their anger at those barbaric and declasse Americans who handled a distinguished man with such disrespect. They can’t complain that he’s being treated entirely like a “common criminal,” though, because Strauss-Kahn will be getting some special treatment during his stay on Riker’s Island:

Strauss-Khan will be held in protective custody … because of his high profile, said city Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello. Unlike most prisoners, who share 50-bed barracks, Strauss-Kahn will have a single-bed cell and eat all his meals alone there. Also, when he is outside his cell, he will have a prison-guard escort.

It’s not quite the $3,000-a-day suite at the Sofitel, but it will have to do for now.

Land For The Last Piece of Israel

Robin Shepherd reminds us of the inconvenient “hard facts” of the Arab-Israeli conflict:

…1. The Palestinians don’t need a revolution to get a state. They just need to accept Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and put aside dreams – that word again – of annihilating it. It’s really that simple. The rest is detail.

2. A Palestinian state has been on offer from day one of the conflict. The Jewish/Israeli side accepted a Palestinian state under UN Resolution 181 – the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which was adopted in November 1947. The Arab/Palestinian side rejected it and opted for war and violence. That’s why there’s a conflict.

3. Up until the Six Day War in 1967 the so called “occupied territories” were ruled by Jordan and Egypt. “Occupation” took place after the Arab armies again went to war with the aim of destroying Israel.

4. Since 1967, Israel has tried numerous times to give the Palestinians statehood, only to be rejected, as in 2000 and 2001, by the Palestinian leadership.

5. The Palestinian leadership inculcates hatred of Israel on a daily basis in schools, in the mosques and on television. That is why the large majority of Palestinians oppose a two state solution.

6. A comprehensive poll by the Israel Project in November 2010 showed 60 percent of Palestinians supporting the proposition that: “The real goal should be to start with two states but then move to it all being one Palestinian state”. 66 percent supported the proposition that: “Over time Palestinians must work to get back all the land for a Palestinian state”. And 71 percent said Yasser Arafat was right to reject Bill Clinton’s peace proposals in 2000 and 2001…