The Official Roman Polanski Insult Compendium

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It's been a long time since anything has sparked the kind of international, cross-blogospheric controversy that Roman Polanski's arrest has generated. What's noteworthy is not just the legion of commentators or the breadth of opinion, but the ferocity with which those opinions have been pronounced. People around the globe are furious. (If there's life on Mars, Martians are probably pissed at Polanski, too.) It's not every day that opinion coalesces around sentiments like, "He deserves to have his nether regions removed with a rusty scalpel by a drunken, near sighted, baboon." Ahem.

As a public service, the Atlantic Wire has scoured the global media to bring you this definitive compendium of major voices and what they're saying about Roman Polanski:

• Richard Cohen, Washington Post: "A squalid excuse for a man"

• Joan Smith, The Guardian: "An unrepentant sex attacker"

• Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: "He absconded like a weasel"

• Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News: "Even the most ardent and doctrinaire sexual liberationist in the world would be disgusted"

• Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post: "An admitted rapist; an on-the-lam coward"

• Don Surber, Daily Mail: "A millionaire fugitive from justice (and admitted child rapist)"

• Politics as Usual: "A twisted, mentally ill pervert"
  

• Jerri Thompson, The American Spectator: "abhorrent and deviant"

• Michael Wolff, The Huffington Post: "Little Hitler"

• Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain: "A particularly vile pervert"

• Jennifer, In Jennifer's Head: "Deserves to have his nether regions removed with a rusty scalpel by a drunken, near sighted, baboon."

• Rachel Abrams, The Weekly Standard: "You’d think he was Alger Hiss come back to life and sent back to prison--instead of a convicted pedophile who drugged and raped a little girl."

• Vanessa Feltz, Daily Express: "The American Ronnie Biggs...Biggs’s part in the Great Train robbery involved thuggish violence. Polanski’s crime was even more fundamentally repellent."

• Joe Scarborough, MSNBC: "When a 13 year old girl is raped by a powerful movie director who mocks the legal system by fleeing, I say 'no mercy.'"

• Kate Harding, Jezebel: "Fugitive. Child. Rapist."

• New York Times Editorial Board: "To hear the protests from the French, the Poles and other Europeans, you might have thought the filmmaker was seized by some totalitarian regime for speaking truth to power."

• Kieran Healy, Crooked Timber: "[Polanski was] issued a Get Out of Child Rape Free card."

• John Nolte, Big Hollywood: "What exactly would Roman Polanski have to do in order to become a pariah in this town … I mean, besides vote for Sarah Palin"

• Robert O. Doherty, Film Spunk: "A low-life scumbag who deserves to do his time."