Enough is enough. Get rid of the creeps!
From fall to summer, they arrive on our shores. The decadent. The de praved. The malodorous, greedy, drunk and demented.
They are scofflaws and alleged rapists. Petty criminals and those who commit crimes of passion, opportunity or sheer boredom. They have one thing in common. They are foreign nationals.
What is it about this city that attracts egotistical scum unfit to lick one’s shoe? People who have no respect for decent American values?
Long before International Monetary Fund chief and Husband of the Century Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, allegedly sexually assaulted a maid of 32 who accuses him of sodomizing her in his deluxe, $3,000-a-night hotel suite, this city was a safe haven for well-heeled lowlifes.
Many are protected by that scourge of the city, diplomatic immunity — a license to steal, or even maim. But as Strauss-Kahn taught us, immunity isn’t necessary if you have a friendly nation to run to. When caught at JFK Airport, Strauss-Kahn was minutes from taking off for France, whose citizens would sooner eat yellow mustard than force a miscreant to face American justice.
The outrages are legion:
Iranian chucklehead Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year stood before the UN General Assembly and cruelly accused the United States of carrying out the 9/11 attacks. Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, whose wife sports a $40,000 Rolex while millions back home live in squalor, treats his trip to America like a $2 million shopping excursion, while he trashes the West for slapping economic sanctions against him.
In 2003, an employee accused the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — whose job was to protect the weak from scoundrels — with sexual abuse. She fought his diplomatic immunity for seven years, all the way to the Supreme Court. She’s still waiting for justice. Sexual predators rejoice.
Were these people to behave badly in many other nations, they would be jailed or expelled, flogged or executed. So why do we keep bending over and inviting them back?
“We’re masochists,” quipped a friend, Cindy. “We believe we deserve punishment.”
The slights are infuriating. A New Jersey man, Christopher Sales, 49, suffered an accident that put him permanently in a wheelchair while doing work on the Uganda’s UN mission in 1990. But the African nation refused to make good on a $2 million judgment — citing diplomatic immunity. Now Sales is appealing to the Ugandan courts. Good luck with that.
While your taxes pay up to $7 million annually for the NYPD to protect ungrateful hides at UN time, foreign honchos know they can do what they want. With or without the shield of immunity.
When authorities caught up with Strauss-Kahn, who had lunch with his daughter after, said the maid, he popped out of a bathroom, naked — an attack that would be visually comical if it weren’t so sick and twisted — he was on a plane at JFK. (He says the sex happened, but she wanted it.)
Strauss-Kahn was but two minutes from going Roman Polanski (above) — another French citizen, who admitted he drugged and had sex with a teen in Los Angeles back in the ’70s, then fled US justice for the safe bosom of France. The French, you see, have no extradition treaty with the United States.
There are a few anemic moves to get justice. Three New York congressional leaders want to go to the feds to recoup $17 million in unpaid parking tickets with which diplomats litter the city — Egypt being the biggest offender. However, similar efforts by Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer have gotten us bupkis.
The best solution comes from a construction-worker pal:
“We should make foreign visitors put up their houses, their palaces, their fortunes as collateral before visiting the city. Then take it all away if they as much as spit on the sidewalk.”
Have you got a better idea?
TRUMP STUMP & DUMP
That was quick.
For a few silly weeks, Donald Trump changed the subject of national obsession from the economy to questions about President Obama’s birthplace. He rolled over a sleepy New Hampshire town by riding around in a ginormous stretch limo, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1980s. And, for a while, he led the polls for Republican presidential candidates. It couldn’t last. It didn’t.
The Donald decided this week against running for president, choosing instead to return to the life of a TV star and mogul. The deciding point, I’m sure, came when no one would allow him to change the name of the White House to the House of Trump.
Marriage en-genders confusion
Chaz, a man born Chastity Bono, a girl, to pop duo Sonny and Cher, announced this week that he plans to marry his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, this year.
Chaz’s sexual-reassignment surgery, including hormone shots and breast removal, was long and painful — and incomplete, below the waist. So Chaz acknowledged how strange it was that he, now an official man, can legally wed.
“We’re big supporters of marriage equality, and that’s kind of weird now to be able to do that,” he told CNN.
The fact has irked many gays, who are fighting for the right to marry same-sex partners. Chaz has found a loophole.
Crime puts us back to Square one
For a peek into what New York looked like just 20 short years ago, look no further than Union Square Park. Cops have made at least 84 drug-related arrests this year in and around a spot that just a few years ago had blossomed into a pleasant urban oasis.
Today, Union Square has been all but handed back to the creeps and methadone addicts who get their fixes at drug clinics surrounding the park and then plunk their behinds on benches near grounds where children play.
One victim was stabbed by a man screaming racial slurs. Another guy exposed himself in a woman’s bathroom. A 13-year-old boy had an iPad stolen from his backpack.
The political will to clean up precious city streets and parks seems over, finished, like Rudy Giuliani, replaced by the illogical notion that petty crime isn’t worth cops’ time. It’s stunning how fast lawlessness fills a vacuum.
XXX marks $pot for porn warriors
Incredible. The City Council is gearing up for a fight with the pin-headed civil-liberties apparatus to protect your children from exposure to pornography — inside the New York Public Library.
Lawyers have deemed it an adult’s constitutional right to enjoy girl-on-girl action and bestiality in the comfort of the city’s 200 taxpayer-financed libraries. And kids find it as easy as Apple to get a peek.
Now, two city councilmen want to make it illegal to watch porn within 100 feet of a child in the library, a move that might put smut-watchers out of action. Expect a legal fight. The lawyers need something to do.