Begging Your Pardon

You can tell which Republican the media thinks is a threat by seeing whom they go after. Besides Sarah Palin, the current target seems to be Haley Barbour. The outrage de jour is over Barbour's pardon for Gladys and Jamie Scott, two sisters who served as insiders in an armed robbery. Defenders of the Scott sisters routinely emphasize that they got a life sentence for only an 11 dollar robbery. But it was only an 11 dollar robbery because that was all they had. It was still, however, an armed robbery executed at gunpoint. The second line of argument is the usual "racism of the criminal justice system". But the victims who testified against them were also black.

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With all that in mind, Haley Barbour's pardon of the Gladys sisters after 16 years and under the current medical context is not unreasonable. His attachment of a condition in which one sister must donate her kidney to the other is more problematic, because it all opens all kinds of doors that should probably stay closed. What happens when inmates are told that a parole board will view them more favorably if they provide an organ donation? It's not quite China's gleeful carving up of prisoners for spare parts, but it's not a million miles away from it either. But Governor Barbour's actions were reasonably practical and well-intentioned. Compare Barbour's pardon of Gladys and Jamie Scott, with Governor Patterson's pardon of John White for his murder of Daniel Cicciaro Jr. John White barely served half a year in prison for murder. Patterson didn't even bother talking to the victim's family about it. The NAACP and Al Sharpton did their dirty lobbying and they got what they wanted... with minimal media criticism. The few media complaints mainly centered on Governor Patterson not speaking to the Cicciaro family first. As if pardoning a murderer after less than half a year in prison would be somehow okay, if the governor had just taken time off from stealing all the furniture, to tell the victim's family what he was going to do, and tell them that there was nothing they could say that would change his mind.

Plaxico Burress shot himself with his own handgun and got a three-year prison sentence, and Michael Vick received a 21-month prison sentence for cruelty to animals. White shot an unarmed juvenile and only had to serve a five-month jail sentence for manslaughter before being released by Paterson. Where's the mercy for this poor child's family?

As usual there's only mercy for the killers, never their victims. The Democrats have never reformed or repented of their shameless pandering to criminals a generation ago. They've just learned to be more subtle about it. The Rosenbaum family had to spend nearly a decade fighting to try Lemrick Nelson on civil rights charges, after a jury and a mayor who were sympathetic to his murder of Yankel Rosenbaum gave him a free pass. The Ciccciaro family clearly does not have those kinds of resources of energy to keep pushing this year after year, until it becomes a federal issue. And so the Ciccciaro family will mourn, while a murderer walks smirking out of jail and back to his church and the NAACP to talk about "healing". The White pardon has yet to become a national story. But then Governor Patterson is not a Republican tipped to run for national service. And that also tells you everything about what the media's goal really is. Kneecap everyone who might pose a threat to Obama. Then there's Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle's Pardon-a-Thon. If you're a criminal, then Wisconsin is the place to go.

Following a dustup at the Capitol this fall after the state Pardon Advisory Board waived interviews for applicants seeking pardons for misdemeanor crimes,

Even better...

Outgoing Governor Jim Doyle has pardoned 74 convicted criminals in the last two weeks, bringing the total for the year to 177. That’s much more than in any of his previous seven years in office. And Doyle’s pardons since December 15th were more than the 51 he granted in all of 2009. None of the latest pardons appear to involve prominent or politically-connected people. Their crimes ranged from fleeing police to second-degree sexual assault.

And in still more pardon related controversies, Tim Pawlenty is under fire for participating in a panel that pardoned Jeremy Giefer for having sex with an underage girl whom he later married. Now Giefer is back on trial for molesting his own daughter. But if Pawlenty is under fire for agreeing to pardon Giefer, based on the fact that Jeremy Giefer had married his victim, then Jim Doyle should be similarly under fire, because his second-degree sexual assault pardon deals with the same exact situation. It's a pardon for a man who married his underage victim. So if Pawlenty is under fire, why not Doyle? Again the answer is that Doyle is a Democratic and Pawlenty is a Republican with presidential aspirations. Had Giefer not been pardoned, the same outlets blasting Pawlenty for pardoning him, would be blasting him for being an uptight religious fanatic who ruined his life by refusing to pardon him. It's part of the media's damn you if you do, damn you if you don't game. Which is the only game you can expect opposition researchers to play. But at least Bill Richardson has agreed not to pardon Billy the Kid. Oddly enough Obama is being criticized for offering fewer pardons than Bush did. But why offer pardons when you don't bother prosecuting the offenders? Not when Attorney General Holder can only openly dismiss reams of evidence in the New Black Panther Case to argue that he did nothing wrong. South of the border, Brazil's President Lula demonstrated the same sympathy for leftist thugs as Holder when he refused to extradite leftist terrorist Cesare Battisti to Italy. Battisti who had been a member of Armed Proletarians for Communism was shielded first by France's Mitterand and now by Brazil's Lula. Two of Battisti's targets were non-political. Their only crime had been to use armed force to defend themselves against attempted robberies. An act that offended the Armed Proletarians for Communism, who like so many other Communist terrorist groups were armed robbers themselves. Pierluigi Torregiani, a jeweler was opening the store along with his adopted son and daughter, when Battisti and other ARC terrorists murdered him in cold blood. Now his son Albert Torregiani, who was there during the murder has accused Brazil's exiting President Lula of being an accessory to his father's murder. And there's really no denying it. Unlike the Scottish government in regard to the Lockerbie bomber, this isn't about money but the sympathy of one leftist thug for another. It's the same motivation behind Brazil's recognition of a Palestinian state. The justification that Armed Proletarians for Communism used for their murder of Pierluigi Torregiani was this, "to teach people to "allow the deeds of the Proletarians forced to steal to survive". The best message to send is to not allow the likes of Battisti or Mahmoud Abbas to survive.