by Klaus Rohrich
March 29, 2004
So the woman we all love to hate got hers! Yeah, they showed her. Lying to the government like that and denying that she did anything wrong. She got her comeuppance.
Of course some 150,000 innocent people also got their comeuppance along with Martha. I’m talking about the shareholders and employees of Martha Stewart Omnimedia who lost millions in one fell swoop as the value of their stock plummeted. Then there are those who are going to lose their jobs as a result of diminished demand for Martha Stewart products.
When the verdict first came down a number of female pundits claimed that Martha got nailed because she is a woman. Diane Francis of the Financial Post was outraged and claimed that if a man had been charged with the same crime there would not have been a conviction. I’m inclined to agree with her only because I remember a very high profile case where a man was accused of lying to the government, among other things, and wound up getting off practically scott-free. In fact, a movement was created to assist him with his legal fees and to apply political pressure to get him off.
In case you haven’t guessed it, I am talking about the finger-wagging, prevaricating Bill Clinton, who while President of the United States, perjured himself before a federal judge and suborned a witness to perjury. Rather than getting nailed for what was truly a crime, Clinton somehow managed to become a victim of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get him. In the end, Clinton’s punishment was a slap on the wrist: a $90,000 fine and disbarment. The $90,000 was paid by his fawning fans (or maybe by those he pardoned) and he never practiced law, anyway.
What makes Martha so different from Bill? It’s a complicated set of factors, but suffice it to say that Martha’s success, her perfectionism and prickly personality had a lot to do with her downfall. In this Witless Protection Program known as america, people like Martha Stewart are despised because they are wealthy and successful. Think about how Martha made her fortune. She made it by coming up with gazillions of ways that people could improve their homes, serve better meals, care for their families more and become better hosts or hostesses. The liberal Left in the United States isn’t into any of that. In fact, anything that would improve peoples’ enjoyment of their home and family is a de facto threat to the social activists so eager to impose a lack of morals, ethics or standards on the population as a whole.
There’s also an element of envy in that Martha came from a modest background and managed to succeed beyond most people’s wildest imagination. Conventional wisdom would hold that she had to have dome something dishonest to be that wealthy. This envy is borne from the fact that the same social activists who would rather we didn’t have any morals, also firmly believe that little people are essentially powerless and couldn’t possibly help themselves out of poverty and into success unless they did it through skullduggery. They are convinced that unless you’re Hillary Clinton investing in cattle futures, the only way anyone could succeed is with the help of big government. You know, the kind they have now in the European Union, where bureaucrats can specify the exact size and curvature of bananas or regulate the thickness of milk.
Was Martha’s persecution, sorry, prosecution a good thing? at the end of the day I do not believe it was. Did she engage in illegal insider trading by selling her Imclone stock when she did? I suppose we’ll never know, as the US Government declined to prosecute Martha for that and chose instead to prosecute her for lying.
It’s an eyeopener to realize that there is now a law in place that makes it illegal not to tell the truth to the government. Funny, there isn’t a law on the books that makes it illegal for the government to lie to its citizens.
Martha Stewart’s court appearance was nothing but a witch hunt (pardon the pun). It’s true, she probably isn’t a very nice person. In fact, it’s been said that she’s a real bitch. But so is Hillary, and they aren’t dragging her off to jail, despite her ever-lenghtening nose. Martha Stewart’s plight is a sad commentary on what we see as justice. That’s definitely not a good thing.