Just recently the Washington Post reported that the feds are now going after the
Missoula, Montana police department, the local prosecutors, and the local
University officials for apparent or alleged or possible improprieties in how
those authorities handled complaints of “sexual assault and harassment”.
Having perhaps learned a thing or two from the
hard-won example of Soviet ‘readers’ of their available media back in the day,
the SO community might quickly note that there is no actual mention of ‘rape’,
but rather the two hugely elastic terms “sexual assault” and (sexual) “harassment”.
It’s hard to imagine that in the Year of Grace Two Thousand
and Twelve – after at least two decades of the full-court press in the service
of sex-offense legislation, jurisprudence, and law enforcement praxis – there are
still officials holding police, prosecution, or university authority who haven’t
swung into the Correct line.
But it is, after all, an election year and from the
looks of it the pols are going to need every bit of oomph they can entice out
of their bases.
The DOJ’s civil-rights division is going to be
handling the “probe”. Apparently, despite all the handy vagueness and overbroad
definitions now erected into SO Mania laws and jurisprudence, whatever has
allegedly been going on in Missoula is actually going to be further subjected
to the even more elastic requirements of the even more elastic ‘civil rights’
approach.
But it does sort of give the hasty and unreflective
reader a sense that the great Civil Rights Movement of Dr. King is alive and
well and now operating in the SO arena. You wouldn’t want to vote against
Martin Luther King, would you?
The conceptual hook is that perhaps the Missoula
authorities engaged in "gender discrimination" by not doing whatever it was
they were desired to do in their investigations. That might include giving up
too easily simply because there wasn’t enough evidence to bring a formal Charge
– as if evidence should be allowed to stand in the way. Nowadays you are supposed to focus on 'the story', not the evidence. Such progress.
Clearly, if there were enough credible evidence and
the authorities willfully engaged in collective non-feasance by refusing to
enforce the law, then you have grounds for a criminal prosecution of the
non-feasant authorities. But for some reason – one can only wonder – the whole
matter is not being taken down the criminal-Charge route, but rather down the
civil-rights route.
Apparently, the DOJ suspects that the Missoula
authorities “don’t have a system in place” to handle rape charges and such.
Does that mean they have no law enforcement, no criminal legal system, and no
judicial authority in Missoula or in that great State? Or does it imply perhaps
that the hardy Montana authorities refuse to be stampeded into spending what
resources they still have on the Correct (but so very iffy) panoply of SO Mania
process?
This will not be a “pleasant experience, but it will
be a necessary experience” said the DOJ honcho at the inevitable
press-conference. He didn’t say necessary for
whom – and thereby, I bet, hangs a tale. I suspect that in the absence of a
sufficient number of Correct show-trials, the government will now conduct a ‘show-probe’
to demonstrate to every police official, prosecutor, and university administrator
in the viewing audience that they’d better not let still-kicking but oh-so- obstructionist
concerns for genuine legal investigation and first principles get in the way of
keeping the ball rolling and the numbers up.
The allegedly guilty public officials – all dragooned
into standing behind the DOJ honcho (no doubt there was a flag or two in the
background for the desired wallpaper effect) – all pledged their undying
support. Viewers of a certain age will recall local officialdom dragooned in
front of the official cameras during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, that (alas)
unhappy world-class historical experiment that – who knew? – wound up going so very
badly wrong.
Is it because Montana is somehow a vital state
politically?* Or because it is somehow a marginal place that the feds can afford
to use as a chewtoy? Or is it because Montana is one of those places where
officials who have sworn an oath to the Constitution still seem to think that
the first principles underlying that sore-bethump’t document deserve their
loyalty and unflagging exertions?
Perhaps the latter. The County Attorney – one Fred Van
Valkenburg – refused to wear the Maoist dunce-hat (remember those?) and
candidly said that he didn’t know and hasn’t been told just what it was that
his Office was supposed to have been doing wrongly, and that he considered the
whole thing an “overreach of the federal government”. The man is setting
himself up for trip to a re-education camp (although perhaps the SO Maniacs
haven’t actually gotten around to getting a couple-three dozen of those set up
yet). Or possibly Homeland Security has
something set up for ‘terrorists’ that might fit the bill: I know I’ve seen
this and that advocate and cutting-edge thinker claim that patriarchy and
sexual-assault (broadly defined) is a species of terrorism and – neatly – such monstrous
types of perps don’t deserve any rights at all, civil or constitutional or
whaevvvvverrrrrrrr.
Apparently, the County Attorney has had the temerity
to opine that if there is insufficient evidence then he can’t very well proceed
to prosecution. This is grossly not-Correct in SO Mania Regime theology and the
man is clearly a heretic, and perhaps a patriarchal jihadist heretic to boot,
slyly hiding behind the Constitution (which, as Catharine MacKinnon – herself a
law professor and radical feminist thinker – insists is nothing more than a ‘pact with
patriarchy’ anyway).
In what is perhaps the most revealing evidence of
the type of dynamics that drive these types of things, the accused officials
can’t figure out what they’ve done wrong (and they do have more than a nodding
acquaintance with applicable law and praxis). But then, as the DOJ honcho
agrees, he doesn’t really know either. You can’t make this stuff up.
But it all does bring you into that Looking-Glass
world so eerily reminiscent of Marxism (whence – through radical feminism – so much
of today’s American stance to law and Constitution derives): Preservation is
Destruction, Destruction is Creative.
But there is some question of at least a few sexual
assaults (however defined) not having been properly investigated – whatever that
might be code for – or having been “improperly reported” (and whatever that may
mean and by whom: did the allegant not report it properly or did the police not
file it in their database as a ‘rape’ according to the new (and possibly
voluntary) guidelines?).
As always in matter SO-Maniacal, you are confronted
by more questions than answers.
Apparently one Saudi Arabian student had been
notified by police that he was under investigation (although not Charged) and
he left the country (as Saudi Arabians have a tendency to do: one thinks of
that oh-so-speshull airline flight out of the US the day after 9/11, and one
imagines that the gentleman figured that American ‘justice’ in these matters
was pretty much akin to the type of ‘justice’ established in non-Constitutionally
shaped legal systems prevalent in his original part of the world).
But what then were the Montana authorities supposed
to do? Send a secret Montana state sex-offense hit squad to get him back like
the Israelis did when they spirited Eichmann out of South America?
A couple of matters involved football players (but
no coaches): one was allowed to continue playing football after court-process
issued an Order, and the other was allowed to continue playing after pleading
Not Guilty and is now awaiting a September trial date. This somehow is
indicative of either gender-discrimination or a civil-rights violation – go figure.
Behind all of this, I bet, lies the infamous ‘Dear
Colleague’ Letter sent a year or so ago by a bureaucrat in the Department of
Education to all college administrative heads, in which she asks them to voluntarily
embrace a lower thresh-hold of evidence in collegiate sex-offense cases
(despite the fact that the accused might, through the college-run ‘trial
process’, be expelled and – one never knows – considered ‘guilty’ enough to be
put on a Registry.
But such legal ‘technicalities’ are merely the
dodges used by patriarchal officials to hide from the righteous sword of the SO
Mania Regime. (As is, of course, the aforementioned and utterly tainted
Constitution).
Can anybody really be surprised at how thoroughly
the Constitutional foundational first principles are becoming so ruinously
debased in this country nowadays?
NOTES
ADDENDUMNOTES
*A day after putting up this Post I can report that
Montana is indeed the scene of a hotly contested US Senate race and that since the
State is so sparsely populated (comparatively speaking) any money or resources
expended there to woo voters will be tremendously well spent. So you can see how
the SO Mania can be useful for political strategy, even if there really isn’t
anything substantial to justify its use.
In the matter of the Philadelphia clerical abuse
trial, matters have moved into live testimony and cross-examination (after
almost two months of trial) and – as one might have expected – there is now a
great deal of complication in light of evidence given as to whether the
defendants are guilty of the Charges brought against them.
You can follow the trial at the link immediately
above, but I will publish here the text of the Comment I put up summarizing my
thoughts on the week’s process:
“I have been reading
along for the past week as the live testimony proceeds.
First, I want to
congratulate Mr. Cipriano for his reporting and I like his vivid imagery, which
yet doesn’t become disconnected from the flow of actual events unfolding in the
courtroom.
Several points strike
me.
From the technical
point of view, it is not clear from the report of the trial session (and this
perhaps reflects accurately the situation as it unfolded under the aegis of the
prosecutors and defense counsel) how the evidentiary-grade factuality of the
nun-witness’s rape was established.
This point may seem
irrelevant or worse to those used to dealing with the therapeutic forum, but it
remains a vitally necessary point that has to be covered, a ‘base’ that has to
be covered – if you wish – in the
juridical or jurisprudential forum.
That being said, it
certainly seems that this Cudemo was grossly unsuited for priesthood and if
even one of the allegations against him is factual then he committed criminal
acts and his conduct was reprehensible from any point of view.
I would add also however,
that in light of some of the commentary some incarcerated prisoners – through
the curious but very lethally real workings of ‘prison psychology’ – certainly
do consider themselves ‘justified’ in taking lethal – and in at least one case
that is publicly known – fatally direct
action against inmates bearing a child-sex-offense conviction. Which is
precisely one of the reasons why I am very very concerned that convictions in
cases such as these be sound: a death sentence, however informally it may be
carried out, is indeed hovering over all such cases.
And while I am
becoming increasingly accustomed to the reality that some folks comment out of
their heart, rather than their head (if I may put it that way and respectfully
so), yet the literally death-dealing possibilities that can be set in train by
the outcome of this type of trial must never be lost sight of, especially from
a professional legal point of view. But also from the point of view of any
Citizen concerned for the integrity of the justicial process.
It is rather easy to
slide into the more limbic processing of support-group or advocacy-group
discussion, but neither attorneys (defense and prosecution) nor Citizens can
lose sight of the fact that in every trial – and especially criminal trials – we
approach the cage of Leviathan (as indeed, given the crooked timber of
humanity, we sometimes must).
This is first semester
of Law 101 stuff, but it remains a vital reality. As I have mentioned in prior
comments on this site, the tendency in American jurisprudence (and its shaping
legislation) in the past few decades has been to envision the Sovereign
authority (and its potential toward behaving as Leviathan) as a more ‘friendly’
and ‘efficient’ bringer of closure and satisfaction, dispensing along the way
with the vital protections the Framers very wisely put into the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. But the tiger, once loosed from its cage, will be no respecter
of persons or facts, and it can turn on anybody once it has been released to
run (and hunt) freely.
In that regard, and in
light of the Nuremberg references that have surfaced in some commentary, I
would submit that the most relevant lesson to be drawn from those trials is
that the entire Nazi regime established itself precisely by undermining the
vital foundational concepts and first principles of Western law that had been
in place in both the Wilhelmine and Weimar governments’ legal systems. It was
precisely by making the anti-legal legal that the Nazi regime smoothed its path
toward the monstrous history that it then ‘legally’ created.
I would also point out
that from the point of view of legal positivism – very much in vogue now in
this country – there would be no substantive way of objecting to that
development: the regime was properly brought into power (Hitler was formally invited
to be Chancellor and duly appointed by the elected President, Hindenburg) and
hence – from the positivist perspective – its legislation was inarguably the
law of the land. From the positivist perspective there is no Higher Law to
judge what that government enacted.
I also note that in
the Nuremberg trials the monstrous doings of various honchos of the Third Reich
were inarguably demonstrated simply from the history of the prior decade or
more, including what was discovered upon the liberation of the camps in 1945. But
as even this trial in Philadelphia indicates, such easily-established inarguable
demonstration of sustained and premeditated monstrousness rising to a
justification of the Charges brought by the prosecution is not so easily
available; hence the need for careful and full examination of all evidence
relevant to the Charges brought.
Such complications may
seem merely obstructionist outside the legal and jurisprudential forum, but I
would remind one and all that these ‘complications’ are vital and very real.
For those same
reasons, both Nuremberg and Stalin’s trials of the mid-late 1930s were ‘show
trials’, although in the former there was more than a sufficiency of relevant
and credible evidence, whereas in the latter ‘evidence’ was not even considered
a necessary formality. To the extent
that the case at bar is a ‘show trial’ – meaning that it is intended to ‘send a
message’ to those who see it or hear about it – it remains to be seen whether
the case at bar resembles more the former or the latter type of show-trial.
The criminal justice
system or even the civil legal system is not easily or harmlessly envisioned as
merely the administrative agent for ‘striking’ (to use Dzherzinsky’s brutally
vivid image) those persons who are accused and charged by the Sovereign
authority. That is the difference between ‘revolutionary’ law and Western,
constitutional law – nor are these two legal universes and systems easily
blended.”
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