Sure it is, Scott. You find me a victim of sexual abuse who doesn’t want it all to go away, and shudders at the thought of having it all dredged up in an open court, and I’ll swap you my magic cauldron that transforms lead into gold. What that has to do with giving Polanski a free pass — as you pointed out — is beyond reason.

The girl herself, now a mature woman, does not want to pursue the matter because she just wants to leave it behind her. Quite understandable really.

However Polanski has fled justice, knowing he may have received a substantial jail term and has been essentially on the run, living in a country where he cannot be extradited, ever since. I think it is good that justice has caught up with him and he should receive the jail sentence he deserves and serve that sentence in full.

The desire for people to defend him because he is a great filmmaker or whatever is understandable in that context I suppose of Hollywood morality. However Justice needs to be blind. Polanski needs to be sentenced in accordance with his crimes, which are considerable, rather than his artistic merit or social standing. I thought the left used to understand this? What happened to equal justice for all?

He has suggested that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack.

Emmess: Sorry to tell you this, but there are plenty on the isolationist right who’ve believed the same “back door to war” theory for over half a century — that FDR was a war-monger and arch-Socialist who knew that the only way American public opinion would support intervention in Europe was a direct attack on America.

Though if you want to argue that Patrick J. Buchanan (whose ‘A Republic, Not an Empire’ contains a lengthy restatement of that theory) is any kind of “leftie,” be my guest.

* I have many reasons to despise our ex PM ( some of them quite personal) but dragging her name into this is a new low.

Ted Haggard was a meth smoking male prostitute addict – does that mean we can start comparing him to all Christian right wingers?

How about we offer all those who are defending him that they go do his time for him in 1 yr increments each.

I’d like to know what happened to the mother who endangered her girl in the first place.
Was she prosecuted for that?

I look very closely at anyone around my kids and don’t mind any parent who does the same to me at all. In fact I welcome it.

He has suggested that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack.[45] During an interview in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight, Vidal asserts that during the final months of World War II, the Japanese had tried to surrender to the United States, to no avail. He said, “They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn’t listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs.” When the interviewer asked why, Vidal replied, “To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war.”[46]

During domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s imprisonment, Vidal corresponded with McVeigh and concluded that he bombed the federal building as retribution for the FBI’s role in the 1993 Branch Davidian Compound massacre in Waco, Texas.[47]

Vidal is a member of the advisory board of the World Can’t Wait organization, a left-wing organization seeking to repudiate the Bush administration’s program, and advocating the impeachment of George W. Bush for war crimes.[48]
Gore Vidal and former U.S. Senator George McGovern at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, August 26, 2009

In 1997, Vidal was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.[49]

Vidal contributed an article to The Nation in which he expressed support for Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, citing him as “the most eloquent of the lot” and that Kucinich “is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain”.[50]

In April 2009, Vidal accepted appointment to the position of honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Kurt Vonnegut.[51]

On September 30, 2009, the London Times published a lengthy interview with him headlined “We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US – The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it”, which brings up-to-date his views on his own life, and a variety of political subjects. [52]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal
Took all of two second to debunk that

Brian Smaller>Hey, even Oprah said it wasn’t like, you know, rape-rape.

That was Whoopi Goldberg.

Sorry – i confused my lefties for a minute there.

You ask why people associate this with Helen Clark. I can tell you. It is because she, like Vidal, was all PC, lefty-liberal – and probably saw herself that way – but when it came down to a choice between her friend Phillip Field and exploited Thai labourers, she chose Field. When she was removing the legal right of Maori to explore their property rights, she called those complaining about that “haters and wreckers”. She saw herself as tolerant, but showed no tolerance to the Exclusive Brethren, agreeing with Mallard that they were “chinless scarf-wearers”. When it came to a choice between a kiwi summer or spending winter in Europe with Austin Mitchell – the mocker of New Zealander – she chose Mitchell. Hope that explains the comparison.

The guy’s on a frigging book tour, promoting his latest memoir — which I have no intention of reading, let alone buying. If Vidal’s being “exploited,” I’m Marie of Romania.

QUOTE:
Have you met President Clinton?

Yes – and I like Bill. My family is Southern. I’m used to Bill Clintons. The country apparently wasn’t, though. At the time of his impeachment trial, I wrote a defense of him. When he claimed, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” he was totally accurate.

You believe him?

He was talking Southern. In the South, sex is when you put it in and pump away and there’s a danger of a baby. That’s “sexual relations.” Anything else is what we called in school “messing around.” And all Southern boys messed around.
END QUOTE

I must try that one on, the next time I lie under oath: “Hell, I was just messing around — and ‘talking Southern’ about it.”

Whatever you think about his politics (not much, in my case), Vidal’s a fine novelist and some of his literary essays are remarkable. But along with the appealingly patrician prose style, are some less appetizing patrician attitudes towards women — especially if they’re not “one of us” and forget their place. Which in the case of Monica Lewinsky and Samantha Geimer is on their backs, legs spread, and with their mouths shut unless they’re sucking the cocks of higher beings like Polanski and Clinton.

That was Whoopi Goldberg.

I think some of these comments are LOL