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The unzippered princeling and the serving wench
...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."...

...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....

...The arrest of a mediocre international civil servant in the first-class cabin of his jet isn't just a sex story: It's a glimpse of the widening gulf between the government class and their subjects in a post-prosperity West. Neither Geithner nor Strauss-Kahn have ever created a dime of wealth in their lives. They have devoted their careers to "public service," and thus are in the happy position of rarely if ever having to write a personal check. At the Sofitel in New York, DSK was in a $3,000-per-night suite. ...

...Fortunately, when the burdens of recognizability get too great, M Strauss-Kahn is able to retreat to his house in Washington, or his apartment in Paris, or his second apartment in Paris, or his riad in Marrakesh. Oh, c'mon, you provincial bozos: A "riad" is a palatial Moorish residence built around an interior courtyard. Everyone knows that. A lifetime of devoted "public service" in "socialist" France isn't yet as remunerative as in Mubarak's Egypt or Saddam's Iraq, but we're getting there. As the developed world drowns under the weight of Big Government, the gilded princelings of statism will hunker down in their interior courtyards and guard their privileges ever more zealously. Once in a while, as in that Manhattan hotel suite, a chance encounter between the seigneurs and their subjects will go awry, but more often, as in the Geithner confirmation, it will be understood that the Great Men of the Permanent Governing Class cannot be bound by the rules they impose on the rest of you schmucks....