Shannon Love

Glad I Don’t Live In Maryland

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In Texas, if you kill a burglar in your home, no matter how gruesomely, they pin a medal on you. The police very rarely take you in for questioning, and the D.A. doesn’t leave you dangling for weeks while they consider whether to press charges against you for defending yourself and your property. All you have to face for certain is an automatic grand jury review of your actions. Since the jury is a bunch of Texans, something really has to be amiss for you to get in trouble.

I feel for the kid in this story. It really sounds like they’re going to make him sweat while they take their sweet time deciding if he should have screamed like a school girl and locked himself in a closet when confronted by a life-long criminal.

[via Wheels within Wheels]

How Did They Know?

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Rockwell County Line asks a good question about the journalist who uncovered the Acorn scandal:

My question is, how did the film makers know what questions to ask?   Did they have inside information from former workers who had left in disgust when they found out about the perversity of the place?   Had they tried other tacks of questions and never found a limit before (possible drug dealers, counterfeit records for illegals, etc.) so they were escalating until they found something to outrageous that they couldn’t fathom its being supported?

Since this is definitely far from the first time Acorn has enabled criminal activity, I feel certain that the journalist heard stories and decided to follow them up. Apparently, there has been deep suspicion about Acorn in the non-profit world for many years. No doubt the journalist started there.

I do have to give them credit for following up. Frankly, if I had heard reports that a leftist activist organization was involved in base criminality I wouldn’t have believed them. I used to be a lefty myself, and I’ve know too many leftists with great personal integrity, so I don’t associate them with this kind of failure. I wouldn’t have carried out this investigation.

This is a good example of why we need strong partisanship in at least part of the media. At times, we need people who will readily believe something outrageously bad about their political opponents, and who will be motivated to investigate things that will be ignored by the less partisan. We can safely assume that 99% of partisan journalists will produce nothing but noise, but that 1% of the time they will score a hit will make tolerating all that noise worthwhile.

My Response

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I’m going to start pasting the following in threads whenever I encounter the casual and ritualized accusations of racism from leftists.

No matter what
 
You do or say
 
They’ll call you racist
 
Anyway

Abuse of a word or concept robs it of its power. Once the accusation of racism was devastating, now it’s just annoying and merely signifies that a leftist disagrees with you. It only has real impact when made by a non-leftist.

Instead of making the equally ritualized and pointless “No, I’m not a racist” retort, I will use my new phrase to point out the robotic nature of the accusation. Everyone else should consider doing it as well. Maybe we can train them to stop abusing the word or at least force them to come up with something new.