451–460 of 561 posts
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I imagine in the latter form, it's easier to get big boys in jail, because simply being defeated once doesn't weaken all future attempts. I could be completely misremembering though.
Fyi: Austria had a "tough on crime" minister of the interior who ended up in a jail he ceremoniously inaugurated himself.
Something really scary in France right now is that you can see really clearly how most mainstream media are used for propaganda. Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement…
This is hopelessly naive. Heads of state should not be prosecuted in democracies. It sets a bad precedent and there is no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state. There are too many examples in history of abusive lawfare practices. Better not to nitpick about "crimes" in such cases and let the man disappear from the stage. Aggressive prosecutions only increase the likelihood he'll try to mount a politi…
Unlike someone else who is engaging in extreme corruption and is trampling the constitution of his country completely in the open and will likely never face any repercussions.
Maybe... if someone did prosecute him this whole thing could have been avoided?
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Dassault (major newspaper owner) Is that like Lockheed Martin owning a major newspaper or GE owning a TV network?
It's actually kind of worse. Because you get a mix of Dassault (the company)'s agenda (defense spending, pro-industry) and a push for the fairly conservative views of the Marcel Bloch/Dassault descendants themselves. To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views…
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He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.
That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrad…
Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should have the power to abuse it.
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The first trump campaign was fueled by government and banks not being held accountable, ex. after the financial crisis and bailouts of banks. Though trump kind of piggy backed on those sentiments along with the tea party/koch brothers backing. Just goes to show you need to apply justice blindly and harshaly, or else you will trigger peoples strong and inate sense of injustice and burn it all down
>The first trump campaign was fueled by government and banks not being held accountable Nah that's horse shit. Trump has been trying to ride outright populism since Ross Perot showed you could be a moron with no experience and people would still insist you were somehow a genius because you had a million dollars. Trump's first campaign was nothing more than the republican party being utterly ravenous to demonstrate th…
I do not think you should let the Democrats off
Defending a status quo that is so obviously broken, where injustice is getting baked in to cultural expectations...
I am sad that it has come to this, and I fear for the health, very existence, of the republic
A former Prime Minister of a first world country in jail is insane. He must have made a crime without the help of others because in political scandals usually a whole gang of public people is liable. Then you have to convict the monkey with the bananas and the whole tree. If we follow the French justice, in my country (Greece) about 10% of people including almost all the politicians of the last decades should be in j…
Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial: Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux were also convicted, receiving sentences of six years and two years, respectively. And then there are the many other trials involving Sarkozy and those around him...
A former Prime Minister of a first world country in jail is insane. He must have made a crime without the help of others because in political scandals usually a whole gang of public people is liable. Then you have to convict the monkey with the bananas and the whole tree. If we follow the French justice, in my country (Greece) about 10% of people including almost all the politicians of the last decades should be in j…
Well the crime was about using syria's then dictator muhammar kadafi's blood money for his first presidential campaign. So there is a very strong incentive to keep this as private as possible. And in effect he's not the only one to be trialed and judged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrad…
This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue without legal consequence.
Given that the precedent is that the president can arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent state of national emergency and suspend the constitution indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.
There is no excuse for corruption. However, everyone in all countries should ask themselves whether or not most of the representatives in their congress/parliament would, if investigated, be found guilty of the same sort of corruption. Power corrupts.