Bobo Bacchanalias, at Home and Abroad

As Jonah Goldberg writes, when it comes to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged crimes, “yes, the French should be ashamed. But they’re not the only ones:”

As blogger Will Collier notes, if you replaced “socialist” with “Democrat” in many of these stories, and “Dominique Strauss-Kahn” with “Ted Kennedy,” the results would be pretty illuminating.

After Chappaquiddick, the liberal establishment did its best to cover up a potential homicide by the “liberal lion.” It offered something close to a Gallic shrug when Sens. Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd made a “waitress sandwich” out of an unsuspecting restaurant server. And as Christopher Hitchens recalls in Slate, Teddy’s priapic brother John was such a “seducer” he imported “a Mafia gun-moll into the White House sleeping quarters.”

If memory serves, Bill Clinton had to deal with a large number of “bimbo eruptions,” as one of his aides put it. He was accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment. And the same feminists who once insisted that women never make such things up suddenly responded by calling the president’s accusers liars or by simply abandoning the very standards they had established.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and founder of Ms. Magazine, took to the pages of the New York Times to establish what has become known as the “one free grope” rule. Susan Faludi, author of the feminist bible Backlash, suddenly took a more laissez-faire attitude toward sexual aggression, requiring “nuanced” responses “in scale to the offense.” A reporter for Time magazine insisted she’d be happy to pleasure the president just for keeping abortion legal.

So yes, the French should be ashamed. But they’re not the only ones.

By the way, the large percentage of French socialists seeing Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest as some sort of “American conspiracy” isn’t all that surprising, considering the conspiracies that a fair percentage that America’s own socialists believe to get through the day. It takes a lot to keep that conscience from floating up past the false consciousness.