Victor Davis Hanson: Not So Fast on Strauss-Kahn

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Almost everyone who has written about Strauss-Kahn has, quite correctly, used the adjective “allegedly” in relation to the charges against him, which are as yet unproven in a court of law....

Whether she proves to be a prostitute with a sordid past and a slick modus operandi, whether the mess hinges on arguments over money, whether Strauss-Kahn is released from all criminal liability due to proof of consent, or an absence of money exchanging hands, whether he is let go, Spitzer-style, with the finding that the end of a career trumps the trouble of filing misdemeanor charges of solicitation — what bothered most observers still remains:

First, we were given a rare glimpse of the otherwise discreet lifestyle of an aristocratic socialist, and we learned that the life he practices in no way approximates the ideology of equality of result that he embraces....