It’s entirely not my concern, to be honest. I’m not talking about the legal argument, obviously “where there’s smoke there’s fire” is not valid in a court room.
All I’m saying is myself, as a personal voter I would have serious reservations about any politician who has been on trial for serious crimes multiple times in his life. Since DSK will never run for office here it won’t affect me, I’m just saying how I would vote.
Maybe you don’t care about that, and assume that someone could easily end up on trial multiple times through no fault of their own. That’s not impossible. I’m just telling you how I would vote, personally.
Oliver North was tried for several crimes, convicted of some, and those convictions were vacated. So in essence he has no criminal record. Would I factor in that past if he ran for office here in Virginia. You better believe it.
Or if Richard Nixon had run for office after resigning the Presidency. Nixon was never convicted of anything, but his actions and the situation he was in would 100% be a factor in how I voted. My political candidates are not entitled to “beyond reasonable doubt” levels of proof, I can base my voting decisions on less than that.
I’m not sure how this relates to your point. Giuliani got away with it for a while because the press looked the other way. That’s really all there is to it. He had the NYPD provide transportation and security for his lover (who he later married), so that public funding angle certainly existed in that situation. Frankly, I think he didn’t suffer very much because nobody thought he was a particularly upstanding guy to begin with, and when public opinion turned against him, there were worse things than this.
I understand that. And I’m saying it’s stupid. No, it’s actually worse than that: it’s basically a subversion of the justice system as a whole.
If a guy is accused and found not guilty, you’re supposed to trust that the court did what it is here to do and henceforth act on the assumption that he was not guilty. He did not do anything wrong.
Assuming that there’s still something shady about a person wrongfully accused is.. I don’t know, words literally fail me. Let’s just say it’s a colossally wrong outlook on life, one that creates exactly the sort of problems and destructions of lives that false rape accusations result in (among other false witnesses).
It might be “human nature”, and it’s certainly what drives politicians to want to make their opponents deny they ever fucked pigs (to paraphrase a famous quote). I understand feeling , or knee-jerking that way.
I don’t understand *defending *that form of prejudice as if it was rational or sensical. You’re supposed to use your mind to fight against your meatware’s inept pattern recognition engine.
My point was that a simple affair is not an automatic end of your political career. It is entirely about how the scandal itself is handled and what comes out during the scandal.
If it ends up you’ve been abusing your position of power for years to maintain the affair’s secrecy, or that you have appointed your secret lover to a government position, that is going to be a guaranteed end of your political career.
Him not being an upstanding guy is a good point, though. How much any piece of publicity can help or harm you will significantly depend on the public image you have drafted up to that point.
For example Tiger Woods being unfaithful and in spectacular fashion was huge because he had crafted a very refined, published, upstanding public image. He was marketed because of those things and he was a major advertising asset for certain of his sponsors because of that. Some of those sponsors dropped him, some of his other sponsors who were invested in Tiger less for those sorts of reasons kept with him. EA Sports and Nike for example aren’t selling to people who are greatly offended by someone cheating on their wife.
At the height of his drug use each successive arrest of Robert Downey Jr. essentially became less and less newsworthy. When a famous actor first goes down that path it’s big news in the gossip circuit. The 5th or 6th time it’s just background noise.
However even a politician like Charlie Wilson who was known to have low moral standards could be harmed by a case that demonstrates a clear abuse of public funds. Whether you’re a moral crusader or a libertine, pretty much all voters have zero tolerance for a financially corrupt politician.
Further, I think it is stupid for a voter in the 21st century to see a powerful politician escape criminal convictions multiple times in their life and just assume the justice system did a good job.
I think it’s the job of your mind to recognize the naivete of such a position. I thought the courts always got things right too when I was 10 years old and had to watch Perry Mason with my grandmother when she baby sat me. As an adult I have learned that the powerful will often escape conviction and that sometimes the wrong men end up behind bars.
Your argument that it is the function of my mind to make me blindly trust the legal outcome of the court system as the truth about what actually happened is school boy type thinking. I live in the real world.
Cite? France isn’t some third-world shithole; I can’t think why its justice system would be unable to prosecute a rape case.
Clarification: did he actually blame the arrest on puritanism, or the idea that DSK deserves the charges (even if he didn’t rape the woman) because he put himself in a position where he was easy to accuse?
I would agree with that. But I don’t think the public money issue is all that important. What matters is how bad the scandal is and how it relates to your public image.
If you’re saying “my vote and the thought process behind it isn’t required to be rational”, then I’m sadly aware of that. I do think you’re meant to aim for somewhere in the vicinity of rational though. Specially on a board technically on paper hopefully at the forefront of the fight against Ignorance.
I think that’s the *a priori *you should work with, yes. It’s sort of the point of having courts in the first place. Unless you perhaps believe the courts get it wrong a majority of the time ?
Note that I didn’t say you should trust courts blindly. By all means, if a particular verdict looks fishy to you, all transcripts are public AFAIK. Get a look by yourself and get a fact-based opinion on that particular case.
But assuming that just because someone saw the inside of a courtroom, there must be something wrong with him, that’s not smart, real world guy. That’s not even in the same State as smart.
So you’re telling us that prosecutions in fact are subject to political pressure in France? Or is that assessment of your president driven more by your distaste of him than on fact? :dubious:
I’m saying that if the judge in charge of the case was inclined to sweep it under the rug or not fasttrack the trial enough for the President’s tastes, said judge would get publicly taken to task by Sarkozy, who’s done that populist sort of thing before (sorry, Google Translate is the best cite you get :/).
Which is not to say said sensationalistic running at the mouth would in fact influence the prosecution of the trial, nor its outcome. But OTOH if DSK *was *found guilty ? Oh boy, you’d better believe Sarkozy (among many, many others) would never ever let it go away.
Right…and if I didn’t know the details about any of the arrests I would be wrong to just assume that person must be guilty. However in the case of Strauss-Kahn I know enough about his actions that lead up to this arrest to say, “he demonstrated horrible judgment.”
I don’t see anything new or unusual about a rich man in a rape trial trying to put the rape victim on trial. He may be innocent, he may be guilty but he isn’t arguing his innocence of guilt.
Because a trial of the leading challenger to the Presidential election right during election year would be a joke, no matter what. Either the judges go full bore at him and thus kill him politically, and make sure his opponent win or they consider that they can not interfere in our most important election and take a step back.
Either way, the case would have to be extra solid for the judges to feel they can
prosecute it without harming the election for nothing (obviously differing from the considerations of the NYPD and NY judiciary just looking for a high profile case on which to build their career).
Apparently you can read and understand clearly what I’ve said because Puritanism was invoked for the latter (“because he put himself in a position where he was easy to accuse”) and absolutely not the former. Pass that to Martin.
Absolutely not what I’ve said. See above.
He hasnt been repeatedly on trial for serious crimes. See, the inquisitor in you surfaces easily, the guy has been on trial while he was our Finances Minister. He had to quit his job during the process, as is now the custom, but the courts considered there really wasnt much to condemn him with and thus dismissed the case (his part in the case that is). So, the guy was indicted once, for fraud, then cleared. And it becomes:
“I said he has now repeatedly been on trial for serious crimes.”
So where is the plural in your crimeS, and since when did fraud become a serious crime (that’s usually reserved for murder or rape, dude, as if you didnt know it)?
I originally said "he has now repeatedly been on trial for serious crimes.
You said:
“Cite? Has DSK EVER been tried or even under investigation for any sex crime???”
So maybe you see my confusion. I say: “DSK has been on trial for serious crimes multiple times in his life.”
You say, “Has DSK EVER been tried or even under investigation for any sex crime??”
Maybe I’m a fucking idiot but it appeared to me you were taking my statement that he had been charged with multiple crimes (just crimes plural, not “sex crimes”) during his life and then asking for a cite from me to demonstrate that he had previously been on trial for a sex crime. So to me it’s like you were saying I was making the claim this isn’t the first time DSK has been on trial for rape. I never said that, all I said was he had (now) been tried for “multiple serious crimes.”
If your hang up is that in France fraud isn’t a serious crime then I apologize. Here in the United States it is a felony and depending on the circumstances people have done decades for it. I consider any non-misdemeanor a serious crime. In the U.S. any felony conviction means you are ineligible to vote in many of the various states, many positions of trust are permanently barred to you, etc. I don’t consider murder/rape the only serious crimes but instead I think felony / misdemeanor are the delimiters between what is a serious crime and what isn’t. If you go to prison for more than 12 months that’s something serious.
No one I’m aware of is saying he deserves the charges even if innocent just because he was behaving immorally. What is instead being said is, he deserves the massive hit to his reputation because he was acting stupidly. Those are different things.
Does he deserve to have been accused of rape if he genuinely didn’t commit rape? Of course not. But he does deserve to lose his good reputation for being a Class A idiot.
Strauss-Kahn is just another but not a single victim of US political games. A lot of senior European politicians and authorities hold independent position and irrespective of US so they became a target for American special services and their specified work. Particularly Strauss-Kahn created a project of reforming EU’s financial system to make euro more strong and stable and to push dollar from Europe. Of course US wasn’t pleased with such state of affairs and alongside with their French ally Sarkozy they framed up a case of raping maid, which had $ signs in her eyes. And now an ugly French authorling tries to accuse Strauss-Kahn in raping attempt which took place (if it is true) nine years ago… Odd, she was waiting for nine years and now she made her decision… just in time when Strauss-Kahn is going to stand for presidential elections in 2012… Sarkozy became nervous since his blitzkrieg in Libya failed and he couldn’t kill Gaddafi and he had bad luck with Strauss-Kahn…
An interesting coincidence – while Strauss-Kahn is being accused in raping, media published some discrediting evidence on president of European Commission Barroso who supposedly spends millions of euro on flying private jet planes, luxury hotels and cocktail parties between official events. US wants to wreck Barroso since he considered Nabucco project as unprofitable for Europe due to huge expenses on its realization.
Raping and cocktail parties is nothing more than a matter to put both of them away, the real point lies in US’s wish to make Europe serving its interests and to make the highest ranks absolutely loyal. So these coincidences are not accidental – it’s a methodical work.
