Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

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    There was a time, we thought, that the good guys got the bad guys. Justice, it seemed, was swift and fair. Punishment, we imagined, fit the crime. The cell door slammed and that was that.
    Where did it end? With corrupt or lenient judges? With the dumbing-down of jury panels? No, it had a lot to do, and continues, with incompentent  prosecutors.
    This is debatable but let’s say that most notoriously it began with O.J. Simpson. If there’s anything worse to the American mind than a white fairy princess horribly murdered by a poor black man, it’s one done in by a privileged black man, and O.J. had it all.
    And it ever prosecutors were unready for a Dream team defense it was Marcia Clark’s. The defense looked, acted like, and had the expectations of winners while Clark & Co thrashed hopelessly to get its footing.
    Admittedly, in a certain part of the public eye, there was some painful history at play. The rush to judgment of black men at any besmirchment, actual or supposed, of the virtue of white womanhood, was a black eye on the face of the figure that holds the scales of justice. Fortunately, her eyes are covered so the shiner isn’t obvious. Outside the South, no one had to see the spectacle of blacks strung up for imagined slights or because some knuckle-headed white boys just went looking for trouble. But it happened again and again in sorry backwaters of Dixie.
    And when more died from protesting to end discrimination and got the right to vote and a measure of equality, we hoped that would end the matter, that blacks would shut up about the past, the way Jews should do regarding the Holocaust. But the prosecution slipped up in O.J.’s case, and everybody got mad again. The outcome will be debatable till the world ends.
    There’s a longer list but space does not allow, so we move quickly to Casey Anthony. What seemed obvious to all the world was not to the jury. Evidence, and more than the circumstantial sort, was required but found lacking, a case where justice pinched our sensibilities. The prosecution’s own witnesses were a pack of liars and we were left with but one sure thing: this is a dysfuncional family of the first order.
    And the Fates yet sing of Countrwide founder Angelo Mozilo who scammed millions through subprime mortgages and had to pay back but a fraction of what he made; of Ollie North, who lied to Congress about IranContra but after tricking out in his Boy Scout uniform got a vacated sentence and inspired young and old to get his duncey little haircut; and even Michael Jackson survived a child-molestation charge. With Roger Clemens, the judge told the prosecutor exactly what NOT to do, but he did it. It’s amazing that outside of Boston, no one knows or cares who Whitey Bulger is, so for the record he became Public Enemy Number One when Osama bin Laden was done in. Bulger is the worst of crime scum but when a long, arduous trial is over he’ll have a better life than yours.
    At some point the insanity has to stop, but I’m not sure we’re up to it. The Rupert Murdoch scandal will be a test case, and how is the “prosecution” doing so far? Well, the parliamentary panel that had a hearing with him, his son and his Miss Medusa, Rebekah Brooks, came near to making it a sit-down for Tea, meaning: they’re still afraid of him and worry that he may survive it all and come looking for them. Well, such occasions are for probing, not pleasantries. Do your job, guys.
    And keep in mind that he is a purveyor of trash, regardless of being rich as Midas. It’s just that in these times that’s what pays. Murdoch is rich there because that’s what Englishmen go for. Truth is, people who read supermarket tabloids deserved to be lied to, and Murdoch is tabloids with a capital T, all the way down to Fox News. And don’t even get started with me about how not all tabloid journalism is bad; what isn’t stands no higher than dust in the corner.
    Fox hasn’t wanted much of this story but when it does, it’s to blame liberals for what Rupert has done to himself. That too is tabloid journalism, but I digress: back to the “prosecution.”
    This story is long from over because aside from jolly old England there will soon be headaches for him in the Colonies. Who did he “hack” over here? Of course, his initial and, we can guess, continuing defense will be that he and son and the Wicked Witch didn’t know what was going on. There’s leadership for you, and the kind to give creeps to the Board of his empire.
    Once England’s politicians are no longer afraid of him, there could be a hanging, all right. And this time, the prosecution better get it right.
    Or once again, crime will pay.