Suicide Or Assassination?

So, Sunday morning, I woke up to a beautiful cool new day, full of positive energy. I finally was beginning to believe that Sarkozy was going down the tubes in flames. Sure, France was abuzz with the rumor that Carla was pregnant and possibly expecting twins, but that wasn't helping the dwarf climb out of his whirlpool of negative ratings.
Then I looked at the internet and saw the news bulletin that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known here, had been arrested at JFK for sexual assault on an Air France plane about to depart. My immediate feeling was that this was a set up. DSK has quite a reputation. That's okay in France to a point. We like reputations. We like our politicians to be flawed, to a point...He was the most powerful and positively rated political figure in the country. He was posed to step from his term as President of the IMF and the success he has had as herd boss negotiating his way through the minefield of the worst economic crisis of recent times, to what looked like a shoe in for the Presidency of France.
But the ensuing media frenzy quickly turned into a maelstrom of rumors, charges, humiliating images of DSK doing the infamous perp walk in cuffs and being incarcerated in a jail in the Bronx. The details which began to emerge regarding the alleged assault were pretty sordid. Forcibly raping and sodomizing a maid at the Manhattan Sofitel in his 3000 buck a night suite, then hightailing it out of town.
I have a very hard time imagining the frame of mind required to commit such an act. If it were true, then DSK is a monster. I would not want to have a man like that as leader of a country.
But, the question in my mind is was this political suicide or was it a political assassination?
At this point in time, no matter what the outcome, DSK's political future is over. Suddenly every peccadillo of his past has been revisited and new details come forth hourly regarding incidents which allegedly took place many years earlier.
Oddly enough, a few weeks before the arrest, DSK was interviewed by the Liberal French Newspaper, Liberation. He outlined the three biggest personal hurdles in his yet undeclared presidential campaign:
"Money, women and being a Jew." There is an interesting article detailing the conversation and issues in The Guardian.
He started with women. "Yes I like women, so what?" he asked. "For years, there's been talk of photos of a giant orgy, but I've never seen them come out," he added, challenging his opponents to produce long-rumoured pictures of a night at a posh swingers' club dating back decades. He said he had warned President Nicolas Sarkozy (while they stood side by side at the urinals of the gents during a recent international summit) to stop smearing him over his private life. Strauss-Kahn then volunteered to the journalists a hypothetical example of something that could bring him down: "A woman raped in a parking lot who is promised half a million euros to make up her story."
Before Strauss-Kahn's opponents began throwing what one socialist described as "stink bombs" at him, he was keen to present himself as the victim of a potentially ruthless campaign.
Everyone in French political and media circles knew Strauss-Kahn's achilles heel was his attitude to women. Even his closest political allies admitted he was an inveterate seducer, an unashamed libertine. But what makes the scandal new and unprecedented in a presidential race is the crossing of the line to sexual violence, attempted rape and brutal assault.


Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his allies call him a seducer without the "profile of a rapist". But if, as the extreme-right Marine Le Pen affirms, all of Paris had long been abuzz with talk of his "rather pathological relationship" with women, why wasn't Strauss-Kahn pulled up on it before in France? He had already been chastised by the IMF over one affair with a junior in 2008.


It raises the uncomfortable question in the French media and politics of two parallel worlds: what is printed, and what is behind it, gossip, and what must officially remain "unsaid".


This makes the possibility of political assassination all the more likely as a scenario. I would like to play the part of Georges Simenon's, Inspector Jules Maigret, who when asked if he had an opinion about a case he was involved with, would invariably state, "I have absolutely no idea."
That is why, given the players, the statements by Claude Gueant, The Minister of The Interior a few weeks ago regarding DSK's presidential bid, I remain skeptical. Gueant said, "If DSK runs, the UMP would unleash a "nuclear firestorm."
It started two weeks ago with the publication of photos of DSK getting out of a very expensive Porsche, as if this would be personally damning to a Socialist Party candidate. It wasn't his car, but the Sarkozy friendly Paris-Match did not mention that....
As Jules Maigret would say, "I have absolutely no idea."