Wait: does this mean gulags didn’t exist…?

Formerly respectable Gulag author Anne Applebaum makes new excuses for rapist pal Roman Polanski, then gets her facts wrong or is just plain making up stuff, hoping nobody notices.

What does it mean when a pop star makes more sense than a Pulitzer Prize winner?

Meanwhile, is there hope for France after all?

The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.

That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”