Excellent little bit of posting there JR!

I've thought quite a bit lately about the extraordinary focus there is on the private lives and businessof the powerful.  It's interesting because while they know they are powerful and their actions, no matter how trivial, could become fodder for the tabloid press (meaning all the mainstream media nowadays) yet they feel like and proceed in their lives as though they were somehow just like the rest of us.  There is the well known sense of invulnerability which we all knowis a delusionbut those suffering from it cannot see how frail their cocoon is.  Tawdry and unseemly incidents like that of Strauss Kahn, Schwarzenegger and Wiener istantly become the circuses part of the bread and circuses fixation of our great empire and her allies and the crowd revels in the complete destruction of the lives of the people caught in lurid or unsundrie behavior.  Then I think about the wee folk and how if just about anybody's sex life, the details of it all, what you said, what you did, who you said or did it with/to became public it would look equally grotesque even if that normal person did nothing "wrong". It reminds me of a short routine Sam Kinnison did on SNL once when his featured guest was Seka.  He asked the audience if they'd ever videotaped themselves having sex and said that he had recently.  He then quickly told the audience never to do it, that while Seka might look good having sex regular people look horrible, like rutting bears or fat cattle, etc...  It seems to me that the entire world, and certainly the US, would be better off if the sexual pecadilloes and other personal, traditionally private and off limits portions of life were once again pretty much off limits. Criminal activity is different than most of what we see in the headlines which is just seedy bad behavior in most instances.  In the case of Strauss Kahn perhaps the rush to judgment was not so wise if what you've posted it to be believed.  But the Larry Craig's and the Vitter's of the world step over the line of legality whereas the Schwarzeneggers, Wieners, and Clnton's of the world are not and those legal yet tawdry things that go on really just debase the entire society.

At first, I believed the accuser because DSK changed his story from "it never happened" to "It was consensual."  But now it looks like an enormous rush to judgment.  And there should be consequences for this. The cops and the prosecutor practically preened about this arrest.  They leaked to the press that he was some sort of primadonna who demanded special treatment in jail. The judge set an absurdly high bail.  He's had to pay for his own house arrest, at a cost of a quarter million dollars a month.  He had to step down from the IMF and lost a shot at the presidency of France. Meanwhile, the accuser remains somewhat anonymous, the judge will continue in his career, the cops who paraded him around and leaked pictures and detaiils to the press will go unpunished and Cyrus Vance, scion to a New York politico family, will continue on with his fabulous life.  It's pretty sick what we put the accused through, but we only see it when a criminal case falls apart.