UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE: The Wayward Lemming Is Closed for Repairs Thursday, May 5 2016 

Politics and Sports , , , , , , victorgold 12:59 pm

Alexander Hamilton, the genius of the Federalist Papers, will remain on the face of the ten dollar bill only because of a Broadway musical in which he is portrayed as a hip-hop-singing Latino.

George Mason School of Law, named after the father of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, is being renamed the Antonin Scalia Law School as a matter of principal ($30 million, to be exact).

A transplanted 74-year-old Brooklyn Marxist who went to Moscow for his honeymoon has built a cult following of college-educated Democrats in search of an alternative to Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump, who thinks Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii and Ted Cruz’s father had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, will be the presidential nominee of the party of Abraham Lincoln (who he thinks was a loser for not hiring a better bodyguard), Theodore Roosevelt (who he thinks should have made the Panamanians pay for the building of the Canal), Dwight Eisenhower (who he thinks should have finished off the Germans quicker), and Ronald Reagan (who he thinks was a fair president but a low-energy actor).

The Chicago Cubs now have the best record in baseball. Repeat: The Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series in 108 years.

Who am I to pretend to know what’s going on? I haven’t the slightest idea. Neither do George Will, David Brooks or any of the other cultural / political sages of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Like the polar bears in the upper Arctic swimming for their lives because the ice floes have melted, they don’t know what the hell is going on. But given the income they earn by pretending to, they can’t afford to admit it.

I can. Time to settle in for a while and try to separate the wheat of reality from the media-internet chaff. Maybe, as with those ice floes, the whole cycle can be chalked up to climate change. That at least makes sense. The Cubs being in first place doesn’t.

Sound bite to remember

“Whenever you see the crowd run one way, go the other.”

–My father’s sage advice (circa 1935)

 

Hearings Point to Release of Hinckley Friday, May 8 2015 

Ethics and Politics victorgold 4:04 pm

HEARINGS POINT TO RELEASE OF HINCKLEY

–Headline, Washington Post / May 1, 2015

The medical official charged with custody of John Hinckley, arguing that he be released from a psychiatric hospital, says that requiring Hinckley to wear an ankle monitor if set free would be “stigmatizing” the would-be presidential assassin “for no good reason.”

Question re political correctness: On reading that quote in the Post, was it appropriate to (1) laugh, (2) cry, or (3) simply wince?

At the same hearing Hinckley’s lawyer, while admitting that his client has a “highly attenuated narcissistic personality disorder,” argued that Hinckley ‘has a right grounded in the Constitution to the least-restrictive environment consistent with public safety.”

Question for legal scholars: Conceding that the Constitution is a pliable document, under what attenuated clause is a right grounded regarding an “environment” suitable for someone with a “narcissistic personality disorder”?

As far back as my first year in law school – in the prehistoric days when lawyers weren’t allowed to advertise and Supreme Court justices didn’t hawk their books on TV shows – I’ve wondered about a criminal justice system rooted in ecclesiastical law.

Under this system, a societal hangover from the Dark Age, if a crime is committed the first question before the judge and jury is whether the accused was possessed by the Lord or the Devil. Did he know the difference between right and wrong? Or, in its modern psychiatric form, was he mentally aware of what he was doing?

Was John Hinckley in his right mind when he wounded President Reagan and a Secret Service agent and forever crippled the life of press secretary Jim Brady? Of course not, say his legal and medical retainers: He wasn’t responsible for his actions because, at the time, he had no “right mind.”

But that being the case, how do we differentiate between a deranged Hinckley, who is sent to a caring government clinic, and a deranged Charles Manson, sent to prison for life and “stigmatized” as an unredeemable instrument of the Devil?

According to the Post, D.C. Circuit Judge Paul L. Friedman seems inclined to release Hinckley, though his final release may take months; hopefully, as far as Hinkley’s retainers are concerned, before the next White House Correspondents dinner, at which time the only question to be answered is whether their narcissistic celebrity client will be seated in the least-restrictive environment of the CNN or the Fox table.

Sound bite to remember

“Wealth is one idol of the day, and notoriety is a second. Never could notoriety exist as it does now that the news of the hour from all parts of the world is brought day to day to every individual by processes so uniform, so unvarying, so spontaneous that they almost bear the semblance of natural law. And hence notoriety, or the making of a noise in the world, has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground for veneration.”

–John Cardinal Newman (1849)