Office of the Independent Blogger

I’m going to operate this blog by a slightly different format on occasion. No, I won’t start blogging sports (although I’d like to mention that my dear Barry Zito dominated the Minnesota Twins and beat the Unbeatable Johan Santana in his house, where he’d won over twenty straight games! PS: if the New York Yankees win the World Series this year, I’ll vomit) and I’m not going to go into miscellaneous nonsense (there is no room for Ms. Cleo’s questionable Jamaican origin, let alone newly revealed Lesbianism) but I will be writing about history and crime when the bill fits. The bill fits today, in the Pennsylvanian story of a gunman who held the girls of a school hostage before shooting them in a line. It’s absolutely disgusting, and I think it illustrates to us a need to have a tougher justice system. Not more gun control — notice: in Colorada, the Colombine boys broke a ton of Gun Control laws. What’s one more? — but overall, I’m not a fan of the speed of our justice system, or the way it works. For all intents and purposes, this is a bastard of a man, a self-confessed former and future Child Molester, and he should rot in jail for the rest of his existence. Edit: he should, but he killed himself. The following is merely a commentary on our legal system using him, if he were alive, as a good example. Any other number of examples may include the man who shot Reagan for Jodie Foster.

But, the thing is, this man will plead insane — at least, he certainly can — and if he does, he’s going to get a softer sentence. That bothers me, and I hate nothing more in Law than the Insane Plea. It reminds me of the “Rehab Trick” in Fame (see, recently: Mark Foley [and here, at this ABC page, are further IM conversations between him and the page in which he offers to get the boy drunk], Mel Gibson. Diversity!): you do something real bad, claim you’ve got a drinking problem and go into rehab. Nobody now talk about you being a child molester, nobody notices that you’re a Nazi from Australia: all of a sudden, you’re a drunk (which is cute in its own way, right? That’s why our laws against drunk driving are so weak) and then it blows over, you check out of rehab, smile, decline publicity for a couple of weeks, and boom, you’re on your feet. What a world.

In other news, Bill Frist says we should embrace the Taliban into the government of Afghanistan. He says, “We’ve got them here, why not there, too?” (Really, he simply believes that, if you can’t beat them, you should let them join you. I suppose that’s how the Republican leadership decided to welcome Mark Foley into its midst.)

Truthfully, I don’t think it’s a bad policy idea to allow ex-Taliban members to serve in positions of power in Afghanistan. At the least, I don’t think it’s bad to allow them to run for offices and, if they win, accept that. That doesn’t mean that the Afghans should start appointing ex-Taliban to the judiciary or anything like that. That would be crazy: allowing them to work their way into politics and perhaps the police force, ex-Taliban that is, is Democratic. It’s what we should’ve done immediately in Iraq with Baathists rather than boot them from their jobs. But, hey, it’s an election year, so I’m all for the Democrats using this to beat the Republicans into the ground as “soft.” The Majority Leader wants to give in to the enemy! (They’d do it to us.)

Besides, it isn’t like the Republicans have been good on Afghanistan at all. They’ve abandoned that place and that should be covered more frequently, so any attention placed on the Republican mishandling of Afghanistan is fine by me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).