Self-Parody is Too Mild a Term

Shorter Verbatim Bernard Henri-Levy: “I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski, who I don’t know, but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to.”

I suppose it should go without saying that this alleged Major Intellectual cannot be bothered to advance an argument defending the proposition that apprehending someone who raped a 13-year-old and then fled the jurisdiction to evade his punishment constitutes an “immense, unbelievable injustice.” (This kind of rhetoric isn’t just silly, it’s insulting to actual victims of immense injustices. At this rate, BHL would need about 70 adjectives to describe the Cameron Todd Willingham case.) To the extent that one can infer an argument from the surrounding text, the mentions of his wife and family seem to imply a retread of Robert Harris’s apparent argument that if you have a spouse and kids you should get one retrospective child rape for free. I once again take this to be self-refuting…