Sunday, April 29, 2007

Impeach Cheney First

There's little room for argument that the current administration is more deserving of early removal than any other in the memory of most living Americans, and, to the extent that calls for impeachment are unable to gain traction, that state of affairs makes a mockery of the purported "checks and balances" built into our government.

A way out of this muddle is to focus on the theoretically second-in-command, more villainous member of the team, Dick Cheney.

That a Google search on the phrase "impeach Cheney first" produces 86,000 hits (97,000 the following day) indicates this is a popular idea.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

A case of twisted logic

Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say. Perhaps, at least in the minds of some, that principle applies to unsolved crimes such that, if one cold case is finally solved, ten more similar crimes must be committed so that one of them can go on to become a mystery, maintaining a sort of balance in which the rule of law is never quite allowed to quell chaos. If this were true then we should hold those who solve cold cases accountable for the havoc doing so could precipitate. If this were true, we should be glad for having fulfilled nature's demand for cracks in the wall of justice and sweep remainaing evidence under the rug. Makes a sort of twisted sense, doesn't it?

Some such logic must salve the conscience of the person or persons responsible for the death of JBR, ten years and some months ago, assuming they have a conscience at all.

Sure, she got the princess treatment, and posthumously gained celebrity status, but the fact is that a little girl was murdered, her family horribly disrupted, and a whole town raked repeatedly over the coals, and the responsible person or persons still haven't been brought to account.

Statutes of limitaions do not exist for some crimes, because they are so heinous that no passage of time (or passing on of those directly affected) can ever be sufficient to reduce them to irrelevance. The case of JBR is neither more nor less worthy of dogged pursuit because her parents were well-to-do, or because she'd fared well in child beauty pageants. It is, like less well publicized cases, a standing insult to society in persistent need of remedy.