The ridiculous lengths some Polanksi supporters will go through to defend “their guy”

Just when you thought you’d seen it all. Check out Patterico’s blog (here and here) for mountains of evidence that the associate producer of a sympathetic Polanksi “documentary” from last year has been posting anonymous comments in several threads Patterico wrote about the topic, comments she wrote in attempts at both defending Polanksi and personally attacking Patterico.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to mess with Patterico, prepare to be verbally b*tch-slapped.

Related to all this, Mark Steyn puts the final nail in the coffin of the Hollyweirdos who have defended Polanksi over the last week in response to his detention in Switzerland:

Let us stipulate that Roman Polanski has memories few of us would wish to bear. He is the only movie director to have had three generations of his immediate family murdered – his mother, by the Nazis; his wife and unborn child, by Charles Manson’s acolytes. The only reason he didn’t wind up with his parents in Auschwitz is that, when he was 8, his father cut a hole in the barbed wire of the Warsaw ghetto and pushed his son out.

In a movie, the father would either die or survive for a tearful reunion with his boy. But after the war Polanski’s dad remarried, and the new wife didn’t want young Roman around. By the age of 13, the pattern of his life was set: That hurried escape through the wire of the ghetto would be only the first of a series of hasty exits.

In Swingin’ London, he made his name with “Repulsion” (1965), in which Catherine Deneuve descends into schizophrenia and kills a man she believes has come to rape her. He hit Hollywood with “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967), in which Mia Farrow is impregnated by the Devil. You could make the case that these films reflect the psychological burdens of his childhood – if it weren’t that they’re almost freakily literal pre-echoes of the violence in his adult life. In 1969, Sharon Tate and four others were murdered at Polanski’s house by a group called “Satan’s Slaves.” “I remember,” wrote Joan Didion, “that no one was surprised.”

One sympathizes. Except that there are millions of children of the Holocaust struggling under the burdens of the past – and only one who deals with them as Roman Polanski does. Working on the film “Chinatown,” the writer Robert Towne found it hard to concentrate at the director’s pad, what with “the teenyboppers that Roman would run out and take Polaroid pictures of diving off the f***ing diving board without tops on. Which was distracting. With braces.”

Braces. Cute. Harvey Weinstein, the man behind the pro-Polanski petition, rejects the idea that Hollywood is “amoral”: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” he told an interviewer.

Let us agree that Hollywood bigshots have “compassion” for people in general, for people far away in a big crowd scene on the distant horizon, for people in a we-are-the-world-we-are-the-children sense. But Hollywood bigshots treat people in particular, little people, individuals, like garbage. To Polanski, he was the world, you are the children; now take your kit off and let’s have a “photo shoot.”

Make sure to read the whole thing.

Cross-posted to Right Wing News, where I am guestblogging for John Hawkins on Sundays.

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