The London Telegraph reports:
The New York Police sent the test results to French authorities on Sunday where they allegedly confirmed the trace. The results are expected to be made public shortly.
Mr Strauss-Kahn, 62, who is accused of trying to rape a maid last week in his suite at the Sofitel hotel in New York, was released from Rikers Island jail on Friday.
His lawyer has already indicated he plans to argue that there was consent.
On Friday, Mark Steyn wrote, “A man is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M. Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Sofitel:”
It may well be that’s he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid — although if that’s the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I’d be inclined to suggest he’s the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”Well, okay. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!
Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st-century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne — or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture.
Yes, Ted Ken!
Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury, but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it — or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!
On PJTV’s Poliwood last week, Lionel Chetwynd had lots of fun noting the reaction of the French media reaction, in full Inspector Clouseau mock-French accent, “Did you see he him in handcuffs? This is evidence of the barbarism and brutality of the American justice system!”
In his own voice, Lionel added:
“They particularly complained that he was being held in an American prison—after all, he’s a socialist lord! If you ever really want to find out what socialists honestly think about a classless society and equality, see what happens when one of them behaves as they like to behave, and when he’s treated as he should be.”
QED: Bill and Ted’s not-so-excellent adventures.
Update: But of course — DSK allegedly plays the card most associated with JFK (the more recent and infinitely less swankier JFK), “Don’t you know who I am?”
Update (5/24/11): “New York police on Tuesday denied reports of finding DNA traces from ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on the clothes of a hotel maid, saying investigators had so far given ‘no result and no information’ about the test results,” Agence France-Presse reports.
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