Those Crazy French

Dominique Strauss-Kahn now is an ex-IMF boss, less than a week after his sensational arrest for attempted rape, assault, etc., at JFK airport in the First Class cabin of a Paris-bound plane. The investigation's similarly sensational.

I make no presumptions about Dominique Strauss-Kahn's guilt or innocence. But I am sure the French are crazy, and -- the accuracy of the title of Pajamasmedia's Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd latest video -- the "Mainstream Media's French Kiss to Alleged IMF Pervert Dominique Strauss-Kahn":

Bernard Henri-Levy:

I do not know--but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay-how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a "cleaning brigade" of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet. . .

I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed "accusatory," meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime--and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact.

So this French intellectual fancies himself an expert on New York Hotel cleaning. And, by the way, Bernard: She's called a "victim." As Matt Welch quips: "another reminder that BHL is 10 times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday ever was."

Luis de Miranda:

Libération carried a curious article by a novelist called Luis de Miranda, titled "A philosophical hero." It is only in France -- no, only in Paris, and only in certain arrondissements of Paris at that -- that such an article could be published. The author takes DSK’s guilt for granted, but does not condemn him for it, quite the reverse. "We bet," said the author, "that in his depths Dominique Strauss-Kahn is joyful. Perhaps he doesn’t admit it to himself yet. But behaving thus at this point in his biography could only have been voluntary. I add that it is heroic."

The feelings of the woman don’t seem to count for very much in the opinion of the author, at least by comparison with DSK’s heroic renunciation of the prospect of supreme power in his country. "If the cleaning woman has been attacked, the woman worker had violence done to her, then we are touching on the sublime, in the Kantian sense."

As the Economist sneers, you have to admire "the use of the phrase 'in the Kantian sense'".

Gilles Savary, Socialist member of the European Parliament:

Everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine, and that he is distinguished from others by the fact that he doesn’t try and hide it. In puritanical American, infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism, financial misdeeds are far more tolerated than pleasures of the flesh.

As Ann Coulter says:

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."

This is the predictable result of multi-culti making everything, including attempted rape, "relative."

Time magazine:

A Paris attorney who specializes in defending victims of sexual violence, who didn't want to be named, says he has "an entire pile of complaints" from women who say they were attacked by Strauss-Kahn. Like Pierrat, he says last weekend's news evoked déjà vu. And like Pierrat, he says he has a consistency of accusations against Strauss-Kahn. "It's all so similar," he says. "The lock thrown on the door, the pulled or ripped undergarments, the physical force that turned violent as resistance mounted, all of it. And frankly, this isn't at all incompatible with the skirt-chaser stories and reputation of an incorrigible ladies' man. [Strauss-Kahn's] defenders tend to say his conquests are seduction, and that while perhaps condemnable as adultery, they don't constitute rape.

Depends on the definition of "seduction."

According to the Wall Street Journal:

[T]here has been more criticism of what many see as America's excessively media-friendly and trigger-happy judicial process. U.S. use of the death penalty is a topic followed closely in countries such as Germany and France, where capital punishment is illegal and often described as barbaric.

A number of commentators not only in France--where images of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in a "perp walk" have offended many--but in other European countries have criticized the way the IMF chief was marched before television cameras.

In contrast to the civilized French press, which (unlike U.S. media) printed the name of the alleged victim.

Reports Rachel Marsden:

Parti Radical advisor Dominique Paille hinted at a possible setup, or DSK "slipping on a banana peel." The idea has since been echoed by Socialist Party members and commenters on French websites. It's also the most prevalent comment I've heard from people in the streets of Paris. Not to say that the details of the case as they've currently been laid out favor a conspiracy theory. But the French equate convoluted complexity with a high level of intelligence. That a man of such prominence could simply get caught with his pants down isn't the first likelihood that comes to the mind of an "intelligent" Frenchman. Occam's razor is reserved for Anglo-Saxon simpletons. So I've been regaled with various theories related to the possible perpetrators: the Greeks upon whom DSK was just about to foist deep austerity through the IMF; Nicolas Sarkozy; DSK's potential opponents for the Socialist Party presidential ticket within his own party; the Freemasons; the Illuminati; the "globalists"; the Bilderbergs.

Uh, DC Mayor Marion Barry once tried this defense--with mixed success.

All the more reason why Iowahawk's parody is a triumph:

I do not know -- no one knows -- because can there or cannot there be such a knowing? I do not know. All is but existential abyss. For who is to know this mocking mime which taunts us by its cruel appellation, "reality"? Even reality itself cannot know, because have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. We have only the leaks regarding the leaks of his so-called "DNA." Was he was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, or at which why, as was stated, he was having a mud bath in Baden-Baden with his daughter? Reality, you are a cruel mistress.

I do not know--but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, if knowing were indeed a matter of conceptual possibility--how a mere proletarian chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a "cleaning brigade" to remove to the myriad of empty Dom Perignon bottles and half-smoked Gauloise crushed into beignets they should have expected from one of the most closely watched figures on the planet. In protest I have written to the Michelin guide and demanded they be demoted to 3 stars.

And I do not want to entertain the considerations of dime-store psychology that claims to penetrate the mind of the subject, thrusting remorselessly and without consent into his libido, observing, for example, that the number of the room (2806) corresponds to the date of the coming liberation of France by the Socialist Party (06.28), in which he is the uncontested favorite to storm the Normandy beaches, march triumphantly into Paris, free it from its Sarkozian captors, seduce to the grateful lovesick coquettes with his Hershey bars, and thereby concluding that this is all a Freudian slip, a subconsciously erotic role-play, and blah blah blah. Sometimes a baguette is only a baguette. . .

This morning, I hold it against the jejune American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, dared treat this man of nobility as subject to the justice of the peasant.

I am driven to ennui by a system of justice modestly termed "accusatory," meaning that anyone can come along waving a stained hotel towel and accuse another fellow of any crime--even when the one accused has a pied-a-terre on the Left Bank and sits on several film prize juries.

I resent the New York tabloid press, a disgrace to the profession, that, without the least precaution and before having effected the least verification, has depicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a sicko, a pervert, borderlining on serial killer, a psychiatrist’s dream. In Europe such tabloidists would be thrashed, their backs writhing and glistening with sweat and blood from each stinging kiss of Dominique's beloved cat-o-nine-tails, until they had learned not to jump to such salacious conclusions. . .

Enough is enough, I say. I will not stand idly by as the uncultured puritanical prudes of Les Etats-Unis and their mad inspector Javerts hound another hero of the French nation -- as they did Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Ira Einhorn, and Theodore Bundy -- for the mere sin of intellectual virility, and listening to the "oui" in a woman's eyes instead of the "non" in her screams of ecstasy.

As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto concludes, "maybe French "sophistication" thinly masks a deep sexual confusion that produces such oddities as boys named Dominique."

(via reader Doug J., reader Warren)