This (video: Mots croisés, May 30, 2011) is long but not without a certain shock value: to hear MM. Finkielkraut, Peillon, and Woerth debate the question of who has won the "moral battle" is not without savor. Finkielkraut continues his descent into a peculiar form of senility: he is blind to all persecution except that of the powerful. It pains him, it truly pains him--and few are as gifted as Alain Finkielkraut when it comes to the expression of intellectual
déchirement--to see DSK "driven out" of a NYC coop and forced to take refuge in a $50K/month apartment because of the inexplicable zeal of American judges and district attorneys to prevent him from returning to his home in Washington. What reason could there be for such
acharnement except the desire of NY's DA, Mr. Vance Jr., to win re-election by "taking the scalp of a wealthy man?"
Vincent Peillon, for his part, reminds us that political figures who are seen as paragons of probity often don't do well at the polls. He mentions Jospin; he might have given us Mendès-France. By a strange non sequitur, this removes any stain from the honor of DSK: he would have been a winner, hence it's OK for him to be throwing his wife's money around. The bizarreness of this logic doesn't seem to occur to him. Nor does he ask himself whether DSK's pre-indictment position as the "inevitable" candidate of the left might have owed as much to his wealth as to his talent: which of the other candidates had the means to hire Euro RSCG to buff his image in the media?
Woerth's presence on this platform seems to have been decided by his status as a martyr: martyred, he is retrospectively canonized, and who better than a saint to lecture us on morality in politics? His "presumption of innocence" seems to count for just as much as an acquittal, and he is therefore whitewashed of all past indiscretion and entitled to tell us that black sheep may well be the whitest of the flock, if only we could perceive as he does their inner holiness. "Georges Tron, I knew him well ... " Finkielkraut takes the other tack: he doesn't know either Tron or Strauss-Kahn, hence his judgments are pure of all prejudice, and unlike others, he can see clearly that a "foot is just a foot." Alas, he seems not to have read
the actual charges against Tron, which go well beyond foot massages. For the conscience of France, it is enough that Tron has been hounded from power to prove that he, too, is a martyr.