It’s not often that someone on the Right actually agrees with Glenn Greenwald, but, in this case, I have to say that he is dead on
Post editors should read their own columnists
The Washington Post Editorial Page today lashes out at “Roman Polanski’s apologists,” a group it says is “typified by the comments of Swiss filmmaker Otto Weisser, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, film and TV celebrity Whoopi Goldberg” and includes “a number of Hollywood luminaries — Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, to name but a few” as well as “European political and cultural authorities.”   This hodgepodge of Limbaughian Demons — Hollywood celebrities and decadent Europeans — “don’t let basic facts, or even simple decency for that matter, get in the way of their defense of this notorious director.”
What a righteous stance. For some reason, though, Fred Hiatt’s brave editorial crusaders overlooked two of the most wretched defenders of Polanski:  their very own columnists.  The Post‘s Richard Cohen announced that “it’s alright with me if Roman Polanski is freed by the Swiss authorities” and disgustingly used the word “seduced” to minimize Polanski’s act of child rape. The Post‘s Anne Applebaum called Polanski’s arrest “outrageous” and invoked virtually every defense scorned today by The Post Editors, and thereafter, when responding to critics, spouted outright falsehoods to suggest that the 13-year-old girl consented (while arguing that the real victim was Applebaum herself, who had to endure mean emails in response to her column).
In a sane world, both Anne and Richard would have been canned for their defense of a man who drugged, liquored up, performed cunnilingous, then vaginally and anally raped (that would be rape rape, as in, she said “no” many times, rather then “statuatory” rape, Whoopi, you idiot) a 13 year old girl. Again, without consent. In a sane world, the people who approved those opinion pieces would have, at a minimum, been demoted to inter-office mail delivery.
This is not a sane world, though. It seems to be a world where a major American newspaper coming to you from the heart of our nations capital can print disgusting pro-rape pieces blaming the victim, then conveniently forget about those same pieces. One where entertainment idiots can back a child rapist because he has been so artistic. It’s times like this that I wish we still had some of the same frontier justice we had a few hundred years ago.
