(This is a re-run from April. We in the Stix household viewed John Wayne's swan song, The Shootist, twice over Independence Day weekend, but that's another essay.)
We in the Stix household recently watched the classic John Wayne western, True Grit. In Wayne’s unsentimental yet raffishly charming portrayal, protagonist Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn is an occasional coward, occasional thief, occasional perjurer, maybe even an occasional murderer, and a full-time drunk. But Rooster Cogburn has grit.
Cogburn may be a fictional character, but he is a recognizable type to anyone familiar with American history, by which I do not mean the propaganda currently promoted in our schools and universities.
In this country, men with grit and greatness—most of whom were not cowards, thieves, perjurers or murderers, though quite a few were drunks—used to practically sprout out of the soil like corn. America’s first census, in 1790, showed a combined three million freemen and slaves, and yet there was probably more greatness then than there is now, with 100 times as many warm bodies.
Well, I’m not George Washington, and you’re not Thomas Jefferson; we can only try and be the best we can be. But we have to try!
Various powers aim to rob Americans of their patrimony. VDARE.com aims, as one of the leading forces in the patriotic immigration reform movement, to stop them. Will you join in helping us, with a tax-deductible donation?
History for Patriots—or Traitors?
My son recently turned nine. When he started school, in pre-K, I resolved not to fight with his teachers, until he was along a decent piece. No use confusing the child. And the public school he attends is one of the most patriotic in New York. Whereas school administrators on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would have kids sing the “Internationale” or kneel facing Mecca before they’d have them say the Pledge of Allegiance, every day at assembly at my boy’s school, they say the Pledge and sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
But the books the children are given to read are often another story, entirely.
During the First Grade my son, then six, had a wonderful young teacher, just a couple of years out of teacher’s college. As I later told her, I was glad that she didn’t have any kids of her own yet (and, though I kept it to myself, glad that she wasn’t a party girl), because once she did, she wouldn’t be able to devote herself completely to her pupils. She smiled and nodded in agreement.
But some of the books my son was bringing home from school were abominations which had to be contradicted. One, that was assigned for class, claimed that (white) Americans, in their terrible wastefulness—in contrast to the Indians—had almost killed off the bald eagle. As if the Congresses that passed conservation laws were full of Indians! And what was the racial background of that great conservationist, Teddy Roosevelt? (I don’t know if my son’s teacher or the head of social studies assigned that book, and I’d just as soon not know.)
At about the same time, my son brought home an oversized, illustrated library book that portrayed the Indians as angels, and the white man as a cut-throat savage.
That did it. I ranted against that book to my son, and purchased the 1956 John Ford masterpiece, The Searchers, which we watched together. In that story, Indians massacre a settler family. They scalp the husband, rape and scalp the mother, murder their little daughter, and kidnap their beautiful, teenaged daughter, Debby (Natalie Wood). The husband’s brother, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and half-breed, adopted son, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), set off to find Debby and bring her back. It takes years, but they rescue her.
The thing about The Searchers is that, unlike the supposedly non-fiction book my son had brought home, it was based on the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker. (Unfortunately, the Comanche had kidnapped Parker for so long—25 years—and married her off to a Comanche leader, so that when she was found, she no longer knew English, had two children, and did not want to return to her family. PC biographies now speak of her as having been “adopted” by the Comanche.)
In its Golden Age, Hollywood was never known as a reliable source of history, but those old pictures are today often more accurate than the “history” books that are foisted on our children.
I want my son to grow up loving and honoring his country, but first he’s got to have a country. If this nation’s policies—policies promoted, for different motives, by Right and Left elites alike—continue apace, not only will America soon be a nation unfit to be loved, but it won’t be a nation at all. Giving schoolchildren anti-American propaganda is meant to sap their wills, so that they won’t have the necessary desire to fight for their country that had my late Uncle Irwin Simpkins, later a mild-mannered, college librarian in civilian life, enlist in the Army for World War II, and re-up for the Korean War. (What about me, you ask? Four months after the last chopper took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, I turned 17 and volunteered for the Regular Army. I may have set a record for the most possible ways a man can flunk an Army physical.)
VDARE.com does not promote itself as a history site, but its writers must often treat of historical issues, because so much of anti-American propaganda involves lying about the past, in order to conquer and enslave the American people now and in the future. And since the movement to destroy America has long employed the means of race war, it manufactures a steady stream of racist, anti-white propaganda.
Let’s return to True Grit for a moment. The area where it was shot, in Ouray County, Colorado, already had some period buildings, such as the Ouray County Courthouse, built in 1888, and the movie crew either constructed or converted some Western buildings in the style of the period, in the towns of Ouray and Ridgway. Ridgway preserved quite a few of them. In her short documentary, True Grit: Then and Now, “JeepsterGal” will show a building or a rock in a movie scene, and then show the same landmark now, in most cases looking exactly the same, 40 years later. And the countryside in the San Juan Mountains that dominate Ouray County (542 square miles, present population, 3,800), and where most of the outdoor scenes were shot, is as spectacular now as it was then.
But imagine what the area might look like in a generation, in an America with between 500 million and one billion people. Instead of being virtually unsettled, it could have hundreds of thousands of people living in semi-attached and attached homes and apartment buildings, with the only reminders of places like Owl Creek Pass and Deb’s Meadow the street signs, strip malls, and highways named after them.
Someone might counter, “Well, at least we’ve still got our national parks!”
Not really. As Brenda Walker has also detailed in reports over the years, America’s most beautiful national parks have for over ten years increasingly been stolen and plundered by illegal Mexican immigrant drug gangs, the franchisees in El Norte of Mexico’s narcoterrorists, who have taken over large swathes of the parks for the cultivation of marijuana, and turned them into no-go zones for the Americans who pay for their upkeep, and who are their owners. But in addition to stealing our parks, the harm spreads to ten times the area actually cultivated:
These Mexican marijuana messes are an ecological disaster. They are not innocent little plots that leave a minimal footprint. They are industrial grow sites, toxic stews where the gangsters use dangerous and illegal chemical herbicides, pesticides and growth hormones that result in long-lasting environmental damage.
When Americans, the owners of those national parks, visit them, they increasingly take their lives in their hands. As Brenda just reported today, two campers in Santa Barbara’s Aliso Park area, west of New Cuyama, barely escaped an April 17 encounter with alleged narcoterrorists with their lives. (Aren’t we always hearing that drug offenders are non-violent?!) The campers stumbled onto a marijuana patch being tended by two “immigrants.” When the “immigrants,” who spoke only Spanish, gestured to the campers to wait for “Boss,” the campers fled in their vehicle. They barely escaped a chase by two men in a truck equipped with five high-powered rifles. Police went back to the crime scene, and arrested the men in the truck.
Local parks are also being stolen and destroyed. In 2007, VDARE’s Steve Sailer observed Los Angeles’ “public” Hansen Dam Park, which had been seized from the American taxpayers, and privatized by illegal aliens from Mexico, who made no tax contribution to its support, and who wrecked it. They buried the grass in garbage and excrement, set fires that caused massive damage, brought in horses that were illegal, unhealthy, and extremely dangerous, in an area jammed with families and many small children, for an illegal trade selling rides for kids.
Where were the police, you ask? In his pioneering, postmodern/New Age/PC management style mixing sanctuary policy and de-policing, LAPD Chief William Bratton had long ago ordered the police to surrender most public space to the criminal invaders. Bratton, a Boston-born and raised carpetbagger himself, had earlier announced that if any native Los Angelenos didn’t like illegal immigration, they should leave the state. And millions of native Californians, including VDARE’s own Joe Guzzardi, have called Bratton’s bluff!
Meanwhile, that man presently occupying the White House just announced that he will seek to pass an illegal immigrant amnesty in his first year in office, just as I predicted he would in February.
America is currently well on the way to the worst economic depression in her history, with 6.14 million jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits, millions more having exhausted their benefits (and no longer being counted by official unemployment figures), additional millions underemployed, and millions more soon to lose their jobs, at a current rate of over 600,000 per month. Not only would a chief executive seeking to bring about an economic recovery never dream of pushing for a mass amnesty, but he would be undertaking accelerated mass deportations, so as to rid America of the multibillion-dollar welfare, education, and criminal justice costs that illegals incur, and to put an end to their stealing of jobs from American citizens and legal immigrants alike. Instead, that man wants to amnesty over 22 million illegal aliens?! And just who will pay for these illegals? If he gets his way, you and I will. In perpetuity.
Of course, the amnestisiacs are lowballing the numbers, claiming that only 12 million illegals are in play. Only. They always lowball the numbers and the costs.
The real numbers are closer to 30 million illegals, because the over 22 million I cited above have several million illegal children who were born here, and whom a rogue federal judiciary has redefined from illegal immigrants (per the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment), to native-born American citizens.
But for the Usurper-in-Chief, an illegal alien amnesty is only the beginning.
In a 2007 interview, “Obama” told NPR’s Farai Chideya that as far as he is concerned, any immigrant who is a descendant of slaves or who came from anyplace in the world that had ever been under colonial rule has an eternal and unlimited claim against America (though not in exactly those words), which to him means white Americans.
“I mean, you know, black people didn't end up in the Caribbean by taking a yacht there. They came on slave ships. Back in Africa, my grandfather was a cook for the British army and suffered under the colonialism there.”
Never mind that colonial rule was often the only bright spot in such misbegotten nations’ history. Never mind that in Kenya, “Obama’s” paternal grandfather benefited tremendously from colonialism. “Obama” has instead fabricated a bizarro universe history, in which his grandfather “suffered” under colonialism.
Look for “Obama” to seek to airlift in millions of sub-Saharan African “refugees,” the lower their IQs—the average in black Africa is 67 or 70, depending on whose research you read—and the less suited for modern life, the better.
What is his goal? In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “Obama” says that his father’s dreams are his dreams. Fortunately for us, his father had clearly detailed his dreams in 1965, in an academic paper entitled, “Problems Facing Our Socialism.”
Barack Obama Sr. expressed his rage at seeing that virtually all private property in Kenya was owned by whites and Asians (Indians). His solution: Use the government to steal every last inch of it from them. The elder Obama also suggested possibly levying a tax rate of 100 percent—a rate of confiscation twice as bad as under American chattel slavery—as a realistic option.
Such a mad plan might make a sort of sense coming from a racist, petulant child lacking the slightest grasp of economics, but Obama Sr. had a master’s degree in economics from Harvard! (How did he ever manage that?)
Obama Sr. does at one point acknowledge that seizing the businesses of experienced, capable white and Asian businessmen, and turning them over to black men lacking both in business experience and aptitude might not be economically fruitful, but emphasizes that he doesn’t care. The elder Obama was motivated purely by the politics of hate, and that is the motive now in charge in the Oval Office.
VDARE.com was founded at Christmastime 1999, by that wandering Englishman, Peter Brimelow. Peter had seen socialism and mass immigration destroy his native land, and bilingualism and biculturalism slowly destroying Canada. Peter fell in love with America, became a naturalized citizen, and didn’t want to see her destroyed, too.
Peter may not be riding a horse with the reins in his teeth, guns ablaze, and he’s not a drunk. But he’s a real man, not a movie character.
Actually, if you’re old enough to recall a kinder, gentler time when academics were scholars, rather than self-styled community organizers, Peter gives the impression, in person, of an absent-minded professor. But impressions aside, I think he has grit. And there’s no man whom I would rather have my back in a barfight.
More to the point, unlike Rooster Cogburn, Peter can’t hold up a federal paymaster or a bank, whenever he needs a “road stake” for VDARE. He needs your help. Please give generously to VDARE.
I realize that times are hard. But they’re going to get harder. I’ve written at least 11 previous fundraising appeals for VDARE, without ever employing such dramatic language, but if we can’t fight off this next amnesty push… I’ll leave the future to your imagination.
Spoiler alert: The last four minutes of the 11:32 video that follows show the movie’s climactic gunfight and fadeout. If you’ve yet to see True Grit, you might want to pass on seeing those scenes just now.
But whether or not you watch the documentary, you should first mosey on down to VDARE.com’s donation page here, to make a tax-deductible donation to The VDARE Foundation, the 501(c)(3) non-profit that operates VDARE. Thank you for your generous support.
VDARE editor-publisher Peter Brimelow has commissioned and published much of my most ambitious work, and is one of the few serious publishers who is standing up to the man who presently is holding the White House under an illegal occupation.
This is Peter Brimelow, one of the good guys. Peter talks with an almost impenetrable accent, because he was born in England, but he's an American citizen, and loves America more than most native Americans do. Besides, I don't hate immigrants. Heck, I liked one so much, I married her!
This guy, who is definitely not one of the good guys, looks like a minister from the Nation of Islam. (I don't think he is, but with him, you can never be too sure.) I’m not sure what his real name is, or what country he was born in, but I do know at least one of his aliases.
Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, of Knoxville, TN: Both carjacked, kidnapped, gang-raped, tortured and murdered, in the January 7, 2007 Knoxville Horror (see also here; official story: “motive: robbery”).
Christopher Jones, 14, in Crofton, MD: Knocked off of his bicycle, and stomped to death in on May 30, 2009 (official story: “gang-related”) .
The surviving, and thus unnamed white victims of Aaron Gelly and Reon Hall, in Clapham, South London on October 26, 2008 (official story: “motive: robbery”).
Aysha Dawn Ring, 24, her throat slashed, as she stood in a checkout line at a Catonsville, MD liquor store on November 22, 2008 (official story: “random crime”; “no motive”).
Nivius Vir’s blog is devoted to race, particularly black-on-white crime.
“Liberals are simply people who want to be last in line to be eaten by the alligator. They will hysterically cry and push others in front of them to be eaten first. But they have not a brave fiber of courage to gather together with those in line to kill the alligator.”
If no publication is named, the article in question was published in the New York Times. Feel free to suggest additional titles in the Comments suggestion.
Billy Mays is dead. The 50-year-old star of a thousand infomercials died in his sleep at some point between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Mays was most closely associated with the product OxiClean: “Powered by the air we breathe!”
On Saturday, the US Airways flight Mays was returning home on came in for a rough landing in Tampa, and something hit him in the head. When he was interviewed by a reporter from Tampa’s Fox affiliate, Mays lightheartedly recounted, “All of a sudden as we hit you know it was just the hardest hit, all the things from the ceiling started dropping. It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head.”
But his wife, Deborah, said he had felt ill when he went to bed at 10 p.m. that night.
I suspect that the blow to the head had caused a blood clot, which traveled to Mays’ lungs, heart, or brain, blocked an artery, and caused his instant death that night. I have heard of other cases in which someone was hurt by a sudden jolt to the head that was moderately painful, but did not seem to merit a hospital stay, and who suddenly died within the week, due to a blood clot that the jolt had caused.
I remember the first time that I saw Billy Mays on TV. I thought that he was Bob Vila, the This Old House TV home repair guy whom Mays resembled, though the two had much different voices and styles.
I never bought any of Mays’ products, because I assume that all such products are con jobs, but I enjoyed his commercials as entertainment. (My current favorite TV pitchman is Vince, the “Shamwow” guy.) Mitch Stacy reports, however, that Mays believed in his products, used them all, and gave them out to visitors to his home, and even as gifts to the 300 guests at his second wedding, to his wife Deborah. The couple met when he was pitching products on the Home Shopping Network, where she worked as a buyer.
Mays’ first wife, Dolores “Dee Dee” Mays, who grew up with him in McKees Rocks, had only kind words for him.
“I knew him since he was 15, and I always knew he had it in him. He’ll live on forever because he always had the biggest heart in the world. He loved his friends and family and would do anything for them. He was a generous soul and a great father.”
Mays is survived by his second wife, “a 3-year-old daughter and a stepson in his 20s.”
VDARE reader Ned Garver writes of his experience working in Mexico:
We were required to get a Mexican driver’s license. This was an amazing process. My company arranged for the Mexican licensing agency to come to our corporate headquarters with their camera, fingerprinting equipment and laminating machine.
Surprisingly, we did not take a written or road test. The only instruction we received was never give a policeman your license if stopped, but to hold it against the inside window away from his grasp. If the policeman got his hands on it you would have to pay ransom to get it back.
Note that most Mexicans don’t have to worry about policemen stealing their driver’s licenses, because they never bother getting licenses, just as they never bother to learn how to drive. They just start driving, and let the chips fall, where they may.
With the death of Michael Jackson, the media have done their usual job in such situations, of wasting a great deal of time, while providing no insights into the life of the newly departed and, wherever possible, confounding the confused, and darkening the obscure. And so, until I am able to publish an essay about Jackson’s life, I offer this reprint of my June 2005 analysis during his child molestation trial, in which he was ultimately acquitted of all counts.
June 5, 2005
I do not envy the jurors deciding the Michael Jackson trial. These twelve citizens have begun deliberating, in order to come up with a verdict on each of ten counts, ranging from conspiracy (to abduct a child) to four felony alcohol counts to attempting to commit a lewd act to four counts of molestation. Jackson is alleged to have committed the crimes in question against a then-13-year-old cancer survivor. From all the charges and counter-charges in the testimony, not to mention Jackson’s own bizarre behavior, three things jump out at me.
A Judicial Vicious Circle
1. According to the law California Evidence Code §1108, enacted in 1995, testimony can be given charging a defendant with “prior bad acts” for which he has been neither convicted nor prosecuted, if such testimony helps establish a “pattern” or “propensity” to commit the crime with which he is presently being charged.
This law guts the presumption of innocence, which is perhaps THE foundation of American criminal law.
In practice, this means that if you hate somebody, and find out that he has been charged with a crime, you can announce that he has previously committed a similar crime against your person, and testify against him in his current trial for the previous “crime.” It’s legal double freebie. You get to testify to the jury, as if the defendant had already been convicted of an earlier crime, AND get to prejudice the jury regarding the crime he is currently charged with. (This is exactly what some women sought to do during the 1991 trial of Kennedy scion William Kennedy Smith, whom Patricia Bowman had charged with rape. Smith was acquitted.)
And that is what has happened in the Michael Jackson trial, though Jackson’s million-dollar defense team was able to come up with witnesses who contradicted the charges of prior bad acts, regarding the attempted commission of lewd acts. Imagine the fate of defendants who can’t afford superstar defense counsel.
Such testimony, when permitted, is usually subject to serious limitations, because it is so prejudicial. As CNN legal analyst Jonna M. Spilbor has noted, California law once had such limitations, but they were thrown out the window when California Evidence Code §1108 was enacted.
Judge Rodney Melville, presiding in the Jackson case, is Exhibit B as to why such testimony should not be permitted, and why California Evidence Code §1108 must be repealed. The judge has not only permitted such testimony, he has permitted it predominantly from people who do not even claim to be victims of Jackson, but rather to have witnessed Jackson committing such crimes against others.
Prosecutor Tom Sneddon is Exhibit A: If he had a strong case, why would he feel the need to exploit a bad procedural law?
The justification for permitting such testimony is circular. It goes to showing a “pattern,” but you can only show a pattern after you have convicted the defendant INDEPENDENT of the (supposedly) older allegations.
In other words, only if witnesses accusing Jackson of similar crimes in the past had NOT been permitted to testify, and Jackson were convicted based solely on the merits of the present case, could one THEN go back and see that prior allegations against Jackson taken together with his crime, formed a pattern. And yet, you still wouldn’t know if the allegations of prior crimes were true. But to seek to show a pattern prior to a conviction, is putting the cart before the horse.
Each criminal allegation must be put to the test of a trial. Without that test, allegations as to prior bad acts function as legally sanctioned character assassination.
To get an idea of how prejudicial the law’s effects can be, Charles Montaldo, the “guide” for law at the popular liberal Web site, about.com, assumed that Jackson was guilty of serial pedophilia:
After a heated hearing on the motion by the prosecution, Judge Melville ruled that testimony about previous sexual offenses and a pattern of "grooming" young boys for molestation would be allowed, but rather than allowing evidence about seven previous Jackson victims, he allowed only five.
Montaldo should have said “seven alleged …”
‘Alright,’ you may say, ‘But Montaldo is a blogger. So, how are the Solons doing?’
In some states, testimony as to prior bad acts is considered to have what the law calls “probative value,” regarding a charge of molestation within an ongoing relationship.
Michigan case law has long recognized that, in cases where sexual misconduct by one family member upon another is charged, other acts testimony is highly probative because such misconduct is unlikely to occur between family members as a single, isolated event. Forcing the victim to testify about the charged act apart from its context may unfairly make the victim's testimony appear incredible.
Note, however, how even the Michigan court’s language presupposes that the plaintiff in any given case is indeed the victim of a crime. And in a “he said-she said scenario,” I fail to see how the Michigan decision overcomes the circularity problem. The plaintiff need merely add, “He was hitting on me for months, before he raped me.”
… a witness's credibility can be impeached with intrinsic evidence of prior bad acts bearing on truthfulness, even if the act did not lead to conviction. (Evidence that is "intrinsic" comes from the witness's own mouth, rather than from documents or the testimony of another witness.)
Trying the Accuser
2. Feminists, who coined the slogan that aggressively cross-examining a woman who has charged a man with rape means that “the victim is being raped all over again” notwithstanding, in every criminal trial, the accuser must also, figuratively speaking, be put on trial. We call this the right of a defendant to confront his accuser. That is true whether the accuser is an individual or the state. (E.g., seeking to impeach the testimony of an arresting officer.) A defense attorney who did less would be guilty of legal malpractice. And indeed, if the accuser cannot withstand a trial, then the defendant should be acquitted, or the charges dropped, with prejudice, meaning that they may not be reinstated. (The feminist slogan was invented, in order to make it easier to railroad innocent men.)
In the Jackson trial, it is not just the accuser whose credibility is at stake, but his brother and mother, as well. Indeed, since it is the accuser’s mother who was the main force behind the case, her credibility or lack thereof may, for all practical purposes, be the central issue for the jury to decide. (This although the judge may have instructed the jury to focus on the accuser’s testimony.) The accuser’s mother has been revealed to have a history of welfare fraud. And a paralegal who worked for the mother’s lawyer on a lawsuit against the J.C. Penney department store, in which the mother claimed to have been roughed up by a security guard, has also given testimony unfavorable to the mother. The paralegal, who is not bound by attorney-client privilege (after all, she’s not an attorney), testified that the mother had told her that bruises that she had charged the J.C. Penney security guard with inflicting on her had actually come from her ex-husband, and that she’d sent her sons to acting class, so that they could convincingly lie. (The mother got over $100,000 out of Penney’s.)
Some legal “experts” have insisted that such testimony is irrelevant, because the accuser, in his video, came across as believable. Well, if I were a juror, the mother’s lack of credibility would weigh heavily on me, and I am sure that that is true as well of some of the actual jurors.
Never-Never Land
3. But then there is some of the evidence against Jackson. Even if we call the countervailing charges of different witnesses a wash (one witness testified to having seen Jackson sexually touching, i.e., molesting, an under-aged Macaulay Culkin, but in Culkin’s testimony, the actor denied the claim), Jackson has proudly boasted to the world for years that he thinks there is nothing better than sharing his bed with under-aged boys who are not his sons during “sleepovers.”
Now, I’m not sure about California law, but I would venture that in many states such a remark would, at the very least, constitute a confession to the crime of child endangerment. At least it would, if the speaker were not a zillionaire entertainer.
And then there is the testimony that Jackson illegally served under-aged boys wine, kept adult heterosexual pornography that would be of little interest to him, but of great interest to young boys having a “sleepover” in his bedroom, and a bottle of Vaseline handy.
The Weight
And so, among the many charges and counter-charges of conflicting testimony, each juror must weigh the following:
a. Legally admissible testimony that the defendant has a history of sexually abusing under-aged boys;
b. Jackson’s own history, outside of the court room, of admitting that he has shared his bed with under-aged boys, though he has insisted that this was all innocent;
c. Jackson’s own history of paying tens of millions of dollars to make child molestation charges “go away”;
d. Testimony regarding the wine, heterosexual pornography, and Vaseline; and
e. The apparently believable testimony of a boy whose mother is an acknowledged welfare cheat, and who has been charged by another witness with having admitted to being a shakedown artist and compulsive liar who has a history of using her sons to further her nefarious aims.
One TV court observer put things in the following extralegal perspective, which I’m sure is shared by some jurors and millions of viewers. To paraphrase, Jackson is not interested in sex with grown-up (or, apparently, even under-aged) females, and he’s not interested in sex with grown-up males. So, who does that leave?
Meanwhile, as MSNBC legal analyst and former Connecticut prosecutor Susan Filan wrote in a mock closing prosecution argument, Jackson would have an under-aged boy in his bed every night of the year.
What on earth do you think Jackson was doing with those children in his bed?
(This reminds me of the argument that convinced me that Mike Tyson was innocent of Desiree Washington’s rape charge: What do you think she was doing coming to his hotel room at 3 a.m., and lying on his bed? The argument came from a civilian, my mom, who had two advantages: She had never attended law school, and she had graduated from high school in 1947, back when a high school diploma meant something. My mom, however, did not prevail. Tyson was convicted and sent to prison in Indiana. That questionable conviction did not send me into paroxysms of outrage, however, because it was no secret at the time that, as one sportswriter noted, Don King and Tyson’s other handlers had been following him around for years, paying hush money to countless women who’d crossed the champ’s path.)
If Michael Jackson is convicted, I do not believe it will be on the basis of the prosecution’s case regarding the specific charges against him. Based on the testimony regarding the accuser’s mother (and thus the accuser and his brother), there is enough reasonable doubt for a top-dollar criminal defense attorney like Jackson lead counsel Tom Mesereau to get a hung jury (and thus a mistrial) or an acquittal.
I doubt that the jury will convict on lesser charges while acquitting Jackson of the major ones, because the “minor” felony charges are integral to the major ones. Jackson is charged with having given the boy alcohol, in order to molest him. And the conspiracy charge depends, more than anything else, on the credibility of the accuser’s mother, because the charge comes entirely from her.
According to MSNBC legal analyst >Dan Abrams, the jury could convict Jackson of a misdemeanor charge of giving alcohol to a minor, which would carry only probation and a fine. If the jury did that, I believe it would be because they were acquitting Jackson of all the felony charges, and were using the misdemeanor conviction as a fig leaf to cover up their embarrassment. Criminal trial juries today seem to feel a powerful inhibition against convicting celebrities, regardless of how strong the prosecution’s case is. Meanwhile, they have no problem throwing the book at ordinary Joes, regardless of how weak the prosecution’s case is.
That Michael Jackson believes that he is above the law, is clear from his behavior during the trial. Had a defendant lacking fame or wealth repeatedly appeared late for court dates, the judge would simply have revoked his bail and remanded him to custody for the duration of the trial.
In any event, juries have violated logic in the past, and could so again.
In New York back in 1974, black supremacist gangster Sonny Carson was convicted of kidnapping two men, one of whom was murdered in the course of the kidnapping, but Carson was somehow not convicted of murder. And Egyptian terrorist El Sayyid Nosair, who in 1990 assassinated Jewish radical gangster-politician Meir Kahane in broad daylight in front of witnesses, and was arrested while in possession of the murder weapon, was acquitted of murder, but convicted of possession of an illegal weapon. Nosair was later convicted, as well, for his role in planning the first, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, as part of a group led by blind cleric Sheik Abdul Rahman, that was affiliated with what would later become al Qaeda. (Ironically, Carson, Nosair, and Kahane all promoted ideologies that had much in common with Nazism.)
Endangering the Welfare of America
Getting beyond the court room, it is a statement as to the decline in moral standards in America, that a man like Jackson, who had repeatedly paid millions in hush money to make molestation charges from other boys go away, could still get record and concert contracts, make millions off cd sales, and have a substantial following of fans. For that, we can thank the unlikely bedfellows of gay activists and the Nation of Islam; the former for eliminating the principle of sexual morality, and the latter for steadfastly defending Jackson, simply because he is black.
But what cannot be blamed on gay activists or the Nation of Islam is the fact that in an age in which taxpayers waste billions of dollars on social services which purportedly “protect” children, hundreds of parents across the country would permit their under-aged sons to share the bed of a grown man, none of whom, to my knowledge, has ever been charged with child endangerment for these acts.
Jury Logic
If all twelve jurors vote to convict Michael Jackson, it will be because they have been convinced, in spite of any doubts they may have regarding the honesty of the current accuser, his brother, and his mother, that the defendant is a monster who has sexually abused boys in the past, and who must be prevented from striking again.
According to traditional legal theory and practice, that would be an unjust verdict. But would it be an unjust verdict, according to California law, such as it presently is? And would it be unjust according to a good sense respect for law and the prerogatives of jurors?
After weighing all of the above factors, I’ve concluded that the only just verdict in this case is none at all, i.e., a hung jury and a mistrial. Thus, if I were a juror, I would hope that I would watch which way the wind appears to be blowing, and vote the opposite way. A new jury deserves to hear this case, but without having to endure the incompetence of prosecutor Tom Sneddon and Judge Rodney Melville.
Don’t cry for me, Carolina, The truth is, I never left you, All through my wild times, My mid-life crisis, I kept my promise, Don’t keep your distance.
A dissident journalist, my work has been published in dozens of daily newspapers, magazines, and journals under my own name and many pseudonyms. Whitelisted in New York, I currently write for some magazines and many Web sites.
