Like you I won't hold my breath for even-handed enforcement of the law. There's a standard for the rest of us, enforced harshly and with the minimum of compassion, and another for the connected. We can incarcerate millions, some for dime bag stuff, rejecting defenses left and right, but if it's someone who "matters" (banker, CIA agent, political leader) we get to hear all about their good intentions, can't we all just get along, bygones, etc. I guess most folks seem cool with that. Maybe they aspire to be one of the connected.
Posted by scott at April 24, 2009 05:27 AMnow you expect the criminal cultists to do without their daily "two minutes of hate" from brother lush rimbaugh? geez whats next amnesty for genocidal serial torturers?
Posted by headxray at April 24, 2009 06:17 AMJamal Williams, defensive lineman for the San Diego Chargers, arrested for 85mph and an erratic lane change at 2AM, and held for many hours before his blood is drawn for a b.a.c. test, by which time it is down to 0.07%. He is pleading guilty to a couple of minor offenses: must pay $400 fine and attend traffic school.
How many overweight black guys arrested at 2AM who are not on the starting lineup of the Chargers would have been allowed to sober up before having their blood drawn?
Good grief, you make the US sound just like the UK - or indeed most countries. How would it ever have been different? Who made the laws? Upper-class property owners. The failing is not American, it's human. Any group of human beings with power, uses that power to mistreat other groups and sustain its own position (look at the antics of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe). It's not American who are at fault here, it's humans, who will, hopefully, be extinct within a few centuries.
Posted by Colin at April 24, 2009 09:15 AMThis guy gets paid to write crap like this?
Posted by snark at April 24, 2009 09:55 AMcolin, could we maybe speed that timeline up just for you?
ha.
Posted by the young Judith (tyj) at April 24, 2009 11:43 AMJudith - naturally, like any living creature, I have an instinct to stay alive, so on the whole I'd rather the extinction came after my death. Does your suggestion of shifting it back mean you are prepared to be obliterated along with the rest, anytime soon, just to clobber me?
I wasn't joking, by the way. Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt, all the great achievements of the human mind, do not as far I am concerned counterbalance the almost infinite amount of cruelty, stupidity and downright evil perpetrated by the human race. And there is precious little indication that we're improving significantly.
So, when the vast flaming sword appears in the sky, you can probably blame me for inviting it!
Great post. I do think that reason and morality are the basis of culture, not laws. Interesting that the Republicans are against funding public education and higher education but they never met a prison they didn't want. So it follows that Republicans want evolution and global warming deniers in science classrooms to prevent students from learning the truth or learning how to reason.
The problem is too many stupid, trivial laws which become a perversion of any real justice on the one hand, and the corporate-industrial complex which creates all these oppressive laws to protect itself from the people, lead by the Republican Supreme Court, which sees laws as only for the little people.
Liberals gave into the whole Republican 'rule of law' argument even after Martin Luther King and the Vietnam Anti-War movement taught us better, when the left died in the 1980s. Big mistake. You are right, with Bush vs. Gore what we had here in this country was, to quote Tom Paine:
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case."
It is a good thing that the people finally threw off the last eight years of slavery, created by the Republican Supreme Court, (who should have been convicted as traitors to the Republic and put in jail for life). And yet, here we are again, with the Dems letting Bush/Cheney get away with, well, murder, torture and unneeded wars.
There is no such thing as a nation of laws anymore. But reason and humanity can still win.
Posted by Tom The Patriot at April 24, 2009 02:57 PM