Everybody in trouble with the law is entitled to a fair trial. Nobody is guilty until a court looks at the evidence and decides. A man is innocent until proved guilty. But sometimes we hold the trial at the circus, not the court house.
The state of Florida says George Zimmerman is guilty of second-degree murder for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Mr. Zimmerman says he shot the boy in fear of his life. Now the court, and a jury if it gets that far, must shut their ears to the shriek and clatter of the circus, listen to cold facts, and decide.
This won’t be easy. The suspect made his first appearance in court Friday, arraigned on the second-degree murder charge, and his lawyer in his best judgment declined to ask for bail, citing “fervor” outside the courthouse.
Presidential contempt for the Supreme Court and inconvenient law is not new. But rarely has a president sounded so, well, dumb, as when Barack Obama lectured the justices on what they can and can’t do to his cherished Obamacare.
The court would take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturns his health-care scheme because it was enacted by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” the president declared. Obamacare actually cleared the House by only seven votes, 219 to 212, and on their face the president’s remarks betray an astonishing ignorance of the Constitution and how the republic works.
But Barack Obama is neither dumb nor ignorant. The man praised as the greatest orator since Demosthenes celebrated hope and change in ancient Greece knows better than to bandy words foolishly. So why would he say something so foolish and dumb?
Guessing how the Supreme Court will decide a case, based on the questions the justices ask of the lawyers, is a fool’s game. That’s why pundits can’t resist playing it.
Rarely has a case before the court attracted so much attention as this week’s arguments about Barack Obama’s health-care scheme. Everybody is studying transcripts and accounts of which judge wiggled his eyebrows at whose lawyers, looking for hints, allusions, implications and insinuations, like Las Vegas oddsmakers searching for inside dope from the training camps on the eve of the Super Bowl.
The spectacle before the court brought out the sportswriter in every reporter, pundit and editorialist. Some think the game is over. The Los Angeles Times, designed for southern California readers who wouldn’t mind running the country if they knew where the country was, reported flatly that “the Supreme Court’s conservative justices said Wednesday they are prepared to strike down President Obama’s healthcare law entirely.” Not “suggested,” but “said.”
"Over the top" is the preferred destination of all politicians, and nothing inspires candidates to go over the top like a presidential primary season.
Newt Gingrich goes over the top to fly off to the moon. Herman Cain goes over the top to buy a pizza for all the lovely ladies. Mitt Romney goes over the top to destroy his opponents, piece by piece. Ron Paul has gone far over the top to live on a distant star in splendid isolation.
Rick Santorum is breaking out of the trenches for a leap at the top, emboldened by winning semi-important caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and a more or less meaningless primary in Missouri. He recognizes how President Obama put the First Amendment in mortal peril with his order to religious institutions to put conscience aside and obey secular gospel under pain of law, like it or not. Then it was "over the top" in pursuit of principle.
When you're bored, broke and mad at everybody, including Mom, throwing a tantrum is fun. Three-year-olds entertain their mommies with such noisy fits all the time. When regiments of tantrum-throwers get loose on Wall Street, they make the front page.
The Occupy Wall Street movement spilled a little blood yesterday in New York City -- nearly all of it the demonstrators' own, but for an occasional cop's skinned knee or twisted thumb -- and "film" at 11. Or long before that, on an Internet blog.
Similar disruptions, some with a little violence and some without, marked the day yesterday across the country. Most of the disruptions were in smaller towns, since we don't have enough big cities to go around, and consisted of parades struggling to make an impression. You might not need 76 trombones to get a real parade started, but you ought to have at least one and a couple of drums.
We've "enjoyed" the Arab spring, celebrated by one and nearly all. But if you're a Christian under the wheels of an Egyptian army truck, it looks a lot like winter.
Compassion fatigue runs endemic in the West. The rest of the world succumbs to the temptation to tune out the news from the Islamic world, because news of "the religion of peace" (as George W. Bush famously called it in the wake of September 11), is nearly always bad.
The horrific details of what happened in Cairo on a Sunday night in early autumn has only slowly dribbled out in the days since, and mostly through the work of freelancers, an occasional columnist, and bloggers working on the scene at considerable risk to life and limb. The big news organizations have been occupied elsewhere -- covering the continuing Michael Jackson inquest, the latest celebrity sighting in Hollywood, who's up and who's down among the Republican presidential impersonators.
Barack Obama, with heavy rain falling without ceasing from that perpetual cloud over his head, must find a P-51 Mustang. The plane that crashed in Reno, sending spectators fleeing in a spectacular wind-up to an air show, saved FDR and the Allies amidst an earlier war seven decades ago. This president, too, needs a deus ex machina, literally "a god out of the machine."
The P-51 that crashed in Reno, ignominiously referred to in the early news accounts as merely "a plane from World War II," had been radically altered to convert it to a remarkable speed demon that could do one too many tricks. The National Transportation Safety Board's detectives are inspecting the tiny pieces of wreckage to try to figure out what happened.
The early speculation is that the alterations -- one pilot calls it "like sex-change surgery" -- converted the plane into a machine that it was never intended to be. Ten feet of aluminum were shaved from its wingspan, and the ailerons, on the back edges of the wings, used to control balance, were reduced from 60 to 32 inches. This gave the plane considerably more speed, but at the considerable cost of stability.
We're getting close to the beginning of the new presidential election cycle, so we must get back to Sunday school. The pundits are parsing religion again. Somebody has to pose the liberal's religious test for public office.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, thinks the nation is in peril because several Republican candidates -- and the incumbent president as well -- are men and women of religious faith. Mr. Keller likens religious faith to claims "that space aliens dwell among us," and presidential candidates should be put to a faith test to determine whether they're fit to hold public office. A belief that extraterrestrial creatures have visited Earth doesn't necessarily disqualify a "candidate out of hand," he says, but a careful voter "would certainly want to ask a few questions."
It's not easy for liberals like Mr. Keller to live in a corrupt, rotten society like ours, where every four years right-thinking citizens who read the New York Times, vacation on Martha's Vineyard and eat their organic peas have to take a primer on what the crazy church folk, with whom they're doomed to share the planet, believe is important. This year it's Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry who populate the worst nightmares of good and worthy folk. Four years ago it was President Obama and whether he shared the kooky racist beliefs of his Chicago pastor. He said he didn't, and gave a Christian testimony that would satisfy a fundamentalist test of faith. Eight years ago Joe Lieberman had to demonstrate that his Orthodox Judaism wouldn't prevent his getting the lights turned on at the White House on a Saturday. Before that it was Jimmy Carter's born-again faith, a straightforward description of spiritual conversion that the chattering class never could quite get straight (though they did sympathize with the lust Mr. Jimmy said he held in his heart).
SAN FRANCISCO _ This city has an obsession with the male sex organ, and not just on Gay Pride Day. San Francisco is ever on the scout for new ways to elevate and honor it as the municipal icon.
Gay Pride Day and the parade on Sunday was a big hit, with the usual complement of flags, floats, papier-mache penises held proudly aloft and naked men marching resolutely down the avenue. But now the city’s serious work, as Baghdad by the Bay measures work and defines serious, begins in earnest.
There’s a referendum in November to determine whether circumcision of male infants should be prohibited by law, punishable by thousand-dollar fines and misdemeanor sentences of a year in jail, with no religious exemptions.
The crowds came over the weekend to visit Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of the nation's heroes and the national refuge of broken hearts.
The long line of holiday visitors moved reverently down the lanes through rows of white marble headstones, with only the low chatter of conversation breaking the stillness on the hill where Robert E. Lee's mansion gave the graveyard its name.
Most of the markers are carved with only modest biography: names, dates, ranks and names of the states from whence men answered their country's call to arms. Memorial Day is still observed at Arlington as it was meant to be observed.
Now the real fun begins. President Obama and his Democratic legion, frightened with good cause, want the health care "reform" debate to be over and done with. "It's time to move on." Lots of luck with that.
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