DSK & The Rape of Innocence

Some of the journalists who set about convicting Strauss-Khan in print in the hours and days after his arrest in New York included a cursory 'of course he's innocent until proven guilty'. Others did not even manage that. It's worth reading Theodore Dalrymple on the prejudices and double standards involved in the arrest and subsequent outcry.

'If it [the trial] does collapse, a lot of people will have to re-arrange their memories to demonstrate, both to themselves and to others, that they had been right about the whole business from the very beginning, and had always smelt a rat.....Hatred of the powerful, supposedly because of love of justice, is therefore not in itself a noble or a good emotion. In essence, it appeals to the same baseness, and calls for the same low, primitive and visceral reactions, as hatred of foreigners and immigrants.'