News Item:Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, is lead from a police station Sunday, May 15, in New York, where he was being held. The arraignment for Strauss-Kahn, who's accused of sexually assaulting a New York hotel maid, is scheduled to be held Monday.
Craig Ruttle/AP
The Christian Science Monitor does a nice job talking about the reality DSK faces, even if innocent.
Given my career path, and my daily dealings with people who have every incentive to lie for their own benefit, I was shocked that the probable next president of France would do something so ineffably stupid and out of control.
Locking up a maid, raping her, beating her?
For his part, Strauss-Kahn has demanded immediate blood and DNA tests to prove his innocence.
The background on Strauss-Kahn is rather impressive.
A lawyer, professor, and economist, he was once accused of financial misdeeds, while in office. ( Check out the Elf scandal) Those charges were found to be trumped up, possibly by political opponents.
Elected as a socialist, he went on a privatization campaign that not only increased tax revenues, but increased the numbers of jobs by 300,000.
In 2007, he was appointed to the IMF. There, he worked hard to prevent the global meltdown of various economies. In one infamous speech, he criticized several banking CEOs, accusing them of unbridled and unforgivable greed, and stating baldly that their present course of action would lead to disaster. He called for more regulation over financial institutions, admitting that human nature would lead to disaster without such controls.
He managed to pull together the French Socialists, a task that makes herding cats into a full bathtub seem as simple as sitting down. He was on a clear path to be the next president of France, and likely to be a leader pushing for more global financial controls.
Hmm. He attacks American bankers, and finds himself embroiled in a sex scandal?
Really? Where have we seen anything similar out of New York?
Can anyone say Elliot Spitzer? Especially after he promised to stop some seedy financial games being practiced on Wall Street?
Obviously, even the most talented politician can run afoul of ethics and get involved in sexual scandals. Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and others come to mind. Clearly, Spitzer was seeking sexual gratification from someone not his wife. We do not know if Strauss-Kahn did have sex with a maid, whether he was set up, whether it was consensual if it occurred, or whether he has a really dark side that should preclude him from ever holding higher office. Nor do we know just how Spitzer's every move was watched and described before his arrest, just weeks after he made it his goal to clean up Wall Street frauds.
I do not normally subscribe to conspiracy theories, even when many of them seem to come true (See generally, the UK's growing fiasco over the Iraq Invasion set up)
The forced sexual abuse of anyone is unacceptable, whether it is priest on child or adult on adult. We should keep an open mind, however, that not all the facts are out, and many on Wall Street had billions and trillions of reasons to fear and loathe Monsieur Strauss-Kahn