Man Bites Blog

My first reaction to people defending Roman Polanski was outrage. How could anyone defend a child rapist? It was infuriating to see people who seemed to be somewhat intelligence advancing arguments that would get laughed out of a high school debate.

Thinking about it some more, one could see how the surface story of, “Roman Polanski as arrested at a film festival for a 1977 statutory rape charge” might play into certain sympathies.

• The image of a director being arrested at a film festival smacks of government suppression of the arts.
• The image in our mind of statutory rape is a 19 year old getting arrested for having sex with his 16 year old girlfriend with an overprotective dad who has connections with the DA’s office.
• Some of them were familiar with Polanski personally or through his art.

Now, once more of the facts came out, people should have backed off, but that is a difficuly thing for people to do.

We’ve seen this before with Mumia Abu-Jamal, O.J. Simpson, and others. I looked at it with conservative support of Rudy Giuliani.

It makes me wonder if I’ve ever done the same thing. A walk through the archives here (which I probably take more often than I should) doesn’t reveal any howlers. I tend to reserve my more emotional and poorly-thought out commentary for sports.

The closest I probably came was Sarah Palin. She was brought out and subject to some of the most vicious attacks ever. But she also demonstrated that she was unqualified for the office she sought. But for a while, I didn’t want to believe it. Because that would vindicate people like Andrew Sullivan, who thought an interesting line of inquiry was the decisions she made about when to fly in the latter stages of her pregnancy.

Those who defended Polanski are responsibly for what they have said and written. But I wonder if, under the right circumstances I might act in a similar way.

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