*Weird political sex-smear story here. I dunno what this signifies, but I'd expect several hundred more shoes to drop before it's over.
*On the face of it, the very idea of Sarkozy using sex scandals to torpedo leftists is absurd on its face – what, this stuff from the glittering court of Sarkozy, where the Justice Minister had a child by an unknown man, the Premiere Dame was a girlfriend of Eric Clapton, etc etc? But, given that incriminating pictures of the rich and famous are so absurdly easy to get these days – the Queen of England just moaned about the issue – maybe there's some cell of French paparazzi spooks running loose.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6945960.ece
"The head of the International Monetary Fund has threatened Nicolas Sarkozy with legal action over a dirty tricks campaign that, he claims, the French leader’s lieutenants have mounted to discredit him as a potential rival in the next presidential election.
"Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French Socialist politician who heads the IMF in Washington, took Sarkozy to task over the spread of rumours about his alleged extramarital exploits when they met during a G20 summit in Pittsburgh on September 25.
"According to one account, an indignant Strauss-Kahn erupted in fury at Sarkozy when he bumped into him in the lavatory. (((Nice locale for a sex smear campaign.))) He told the French leader that he was fed up with gossip about his private life and talk of photographs of him with women that the Elysée Palace supposedly could use to smear him in an election campaign.
“I know that all of it comes from the Elysée,” he told a dumbfounded Sarkozy, according to Le Point magazine. “Tell your boys to stop it or I’ll go to court.”
(((It gets goofier:)))
Strauss-Kahn’s alleged weakness for women is often the subject of gossip in Paris and has made him a target of mockery. Stéphane Guillon, a comedian with a slot on the French equivalent of the BBC Today programme, provoked the ire of Strauss-Kahn when he joked on air earlier this year that women in the studio had been told to wear long, sober clothes so as not to “awaken the beast” in the IMF director as he waited to be interviewed that morning.
He said that they would put bromide in Strauss-Kahn’s coffee and that a camera had been placed below the table “to be sure that nothing is going on”. (...)
