Not Good Enough

How dare you take advantage of MY blithering idiot!
--Ren and Stimpy


Nixon. . .was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers, and fascists to run the Government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into mind-bending crisis…

--"Fear and Loathing in the Bunker," Hunter Thompson (1974)

________

To the late Mr. Thompson: It's deja vu, all over again.

The Jose Padilla trial should be of interest to all Americans, yet recently it only rated a page 12 mention in the New York Times, as part of a reporter's impressions of the trial's progress (Mysteries, Legal and Sartorial, at Padilla Trial).

Reporter Goodnough mentions the training camp application which prosecutors are having trouble making stick,

"because they have no witnesses who saw Mr. Padilla fill out the form, and the phone recordings [which] make him sound more troubled than malign. They suggest Mr. Padilla, a former gang member in Chicago and fast-food worker in South Florida, struggled to fit in and learn Arabic in Egypt, where he moved in 1998.

“'Basically, he is a slow learner,' one of Mr. Padilla’s associates told another in 1999, five months after he arrived in Cairo. "

Mr. Padilla and co-defendant Adham Hassoun are escorted to their cells each night by a "phalanx of marshals," while a third defendant Kifah Jayyousi--a Jordanian-American -- goes home with his family.

It seems we treat foreigners betters than we treat U.S.-born citizens, like Padilla. Though his guilt--of something--seems a forgone conclusion at this point, Padilla remains in fact not guilty until proven so by a jury's decision.

"The government has not linked any of the defendants to specific violent acts. So unless a bombshell is pending, the jurors will have to decide whether the government’s interpretation of the intercepted calls is credible. . ."

"On July 3, the first row [of jurors] wore red, the second white and the third blue, leading bloggers to wonder whether they were worrisomely frivolous or unified — or so patriotic as to condemn all accused terrorists."

Ranger cannot begin to understand how a judge would allow such an obvious jury statement. This wordless "Bring it on," is a repugnant phony patriotic partisan display, and should be the basis of a mistrial, or at least the rationale for an appeal, should Padilla be convicted.

What a fine example of the joke the Department of Justice has become.