A sidebar to all this is that when Sheriff Lee Baca had Ms. Hilton released from jail after just 72 hours, he explained that her crime wasn’t a serious one. Seeing as how she has been found guilty of drunk driving on more than one occasion and driving with her license suspended, one can safely assume that Sheriff Baca will not be named MADD’s man of the year anytime soon.
Speaking of designated drivers reminds me that an equally fine notion is the concept of designated voters. It is glaringly apparent that such incompetents as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, are far better suited to driving than to voting.
A caller to the Dennis Miller radio show made me laugh out loud recently. He wondered if there was any such thing as a misdemeanor in the Islamic world. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that he had given voice to a great truth. Whether it’s a newspaper cartoon, the wrong clothing, heresy, adultery or whistling in the shower, everything with these creeps is a capital crime.
Speaking of the wrong clothing, I heard that Iran, in its latest attempt to crack down on its young dissidents, is enforcing a strict dress code. Which makes me wonder if we dare hope that Iran’s fashion police will soon lock up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I mean, where does he get off wearing sports jackets and even windbreakers? What can we expect next with this guy? Is he going to show up with Iran’s chief ayatollah wearing an I’m With Stupid t-shirt?
I don’t usually write e-mails to strangers unless they write to me first, but the other day I made an exception of Henry King, Jr. Being 87 years old and a professor at Case Western Reserve University Law School, he is the sort of fellow typically described as distinguished. A one-time prosecutor at the Nuremburg war trials, he was quoted as saying about one of his Nuremburg colleagues: “I think Robert Jackson would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo. It violates the Nuremburg principles, what they’re doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”
I sent him the following e-mail: “Dear Professor King, I am curious as to the basis for your remark about Gitmo. At Nuremburg, you helped convict Nazi high officials for perpetrating war crimes. They were men who had worn uniforms and committed their crimes while serving under Germany’s flag. The Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, wear no uniforms, carry no flag, conceal themselves midst civilian populations, hide in mosques, and are not themselves signatories to the Geneva Conventions. On the contrary, they target civilians and commit atrocious acts of barbarism, including suicide bombings and beheadings. How on earth do you dare compare Guantanamo and Nuremburg?”
As you may have guessed, I’m still awaiting a reply.
Speaking of prosecutors, I tend to think well of them, as opposed to criminal defense attorneys who, for a price, will happily devote their time and energy to providing rapists, pedophiles and murderers, with Get Out of Jail Free cards. However, I can’t help noting that of late it’s prosecutors who are most deserving of our scorn. The three most obvious examples are Mike Nifong, who tried to railroad the Duke lacrosse players into the slammer; Patrick Fitzgerald, who would probably have sought the death penalty in Scooter Libby’s case, if he could have pulled it off; and Georgia’s Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who apparently thinks that Genarlow Wilson should spend 10 years in a Georgia prison for having consensual sex with his girl friend. I don’t know it for a fact, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Baker is a direct descendant of Cotton Mather.
Still, honesty dictates I must confess I got a chuckle out of composing a sentence that included such goofy P.G. Wodehouse-type names as” Thurbert” and “Genarlow.”