Too bad the arrest of Roman Polanski didn’t occur last week. The
global elite could have paused from its discussions about the
United Nations Convention on the Child (which includes teens) to
kick the issue around.
“Absolutely horrifying,” said the French culture minister
Frédéric Mitterrand. That Polanski drugged and raped a
thirteen-year-old in the 1970s? No, that he has been finally
nabbed for it.
Perhaps the Polanski case could have served as a topic for
a break-out session at the Clinton Global Initiative proceedings
also held last week in New York. The sexual exploitation of young
women has become one of the former president’s signature issues.
As he explained to David Gregory in his Meet the
Press interview
last Sunday, “there’s this whole problem of trafficking,
which has gotten worse in the economic downturn, which
disproportionately affects young women.”
Whether the Clinton White House adhered to the
Tailhook Convention or the UN Convention on the Child remains an
open question. But certainly the former president would agree
with actress Whoopi Goldberg that judgments in this area require
a range of nuance. Goldberg has defended Polanski by
saying: “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. I think it was
something else, but I don’t believe it was
rape-rape.”
How does the National Organization for Women
feel about rape-rape? Will it now boycott
The View? No, as in
its embrace of Clinton, who apparently didn’t commit abuse-abuse
with Kathleen Willey and company, NOW takes outrages on a
case-by-case basis.
Still, while Polanski has enjoyed a robust defense in the
last few days from a legion of Hollywood directors and actors,
other liberals are treating him like a more vicious version of
Austin Powers. Times have changed since the 1970s when Polanski
could get 40 days in jail for a crime that would imprison him for
40 years today.
Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post
is
glad to see justice done here, as is the editorial page
of the New York Times, which
says the case is about an “adult preying on a
child.”
Don’t look now, but a small fissure has opened up between
European and American liberals. The Times
even said “we disagree strongly” with the “prevailing mood”
in Europe. Maybe an Obama-Sarkozy summit in Gstaad will have to
be arranged.
Polanski’s only defender on Hardball
was
Willie Brown, whose defense-lawyer-style liberalism
failed to impress his sparring partner, an indignant female
attorney. A careful Chris Matthews kept his distance from the
bickering.
An Anderson Cooper segment
on CNN about Polanski’s fate wasn’t all that favorable to
him either. Jeffrey Toobin, its legal expert, adopted a
justice-is-justice tone and said that broken plea bargains never
justify fugitive flight.
Apparently Polanski has been hoist by his own petard: the
recent documentary that he encouraged, Roman Polanski: Wanted
and Desired, which was supposed to accelerate
his rehabilitation, has retarded it, by baiting American
prosecutors into tracking him down. Like Austin Powers, Polanski
misjudged the new liberal world that he inhabits, with its mixed
signals of permissiveness and regulation.
For whatever reason, the indulgence that liberals recently
extended to Michael Jackson no longer covers him. Maybe his
timing was poor. Had he been picked up during Bush’s term rather
than Obama’s, the New York Times editorial
would probably have seen it as a “distraction” from the war on
terror and “one more example” of run-amok moralism. ACLU liberals
would have complained about procedural violations, and the
Democrats would have seen it as a needless offense to a favorite
ally, the French.
