A Narcissistic Clique With A Monstrous Sense Of Entitlement

This is the week that keeps on giving, isn't it?
Gawker has been all over the Schwarzenneger story
including publishing a photo of the housekeeper/other woman/mother of the love child.

and the Daily Beast...yes I get my scandal news from the best sources...
has a well written article on DSK.
The Narcissists Defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn by Michelle Goldberg

So this is the dark side of the famed French sexual sophistication. For decades now, American liberals, myself included, have bought into the notion that the discreet French approach to the private lives of public figures is superior to America’s tabloid Puritanism. Often, after all, the same qualities that make men effective leaders—ambition, grandiosity, love of power, and an unquenchable hunger for affection—make them bad husbands. The French system of accommodating this complexity seemed admirable, especially during the years when Bill Clinton was nearly hounded out of office for a seedy but consensual affair.

But the aftermath of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest puts the French approach in a rather different light. Rather than evidence of liberality, the silence that protected Strauss-Kahn seems like a conspiracy allowing a powerful man to prey on powerless women. And the apologists for Strauss-Kahn, like the egregious Bernard-Henri Levy, reveal themselves not as worldly humanists, but as members of a narcissistic clique with a monstrous sense of entitlement.


A narcissistic clique with a monstrous sense of entitlement
what an excellent description

In a piece published, alas, in The Daily Beast, Levy, erstwhile defender of admitted rapist Roman Polanski, declared himself outraged by the treatment his friend Strauss-Kahn was subjected to after his arrest on charges of attempted rape, sexual abuse, and unlawful imprisonment. “[N]othing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs,” he wrote. If Levy wanted to argue that the American justice system is brutal to all those caught up in it, that it treats people in a way at odds with the presumption of innocence, he’d have a point. But his argument wasn’t so universal. Instead, he raged at “the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.” As opposed to what? If our criminal justice system is indeed refusing to accord special treatment to a rich and powerful foreign official accused of attacking a maid, surely that is to its immense credit. That Levy believes otherwise should forever disqualify him as a credible champion of democracy.


Of course, I am not a fan of BHL for a multitude of reasons
including the fact that I just can't take seriously a man who poses with his shirt as such
Bernard-Henri Levy in all his brawny Gallic glory
Can you?