Why This Crap Matters
You might ask yourself, why are we defending Barry Bonds? Isn't he a cheater, and isn't cheating wrong? Why are we on the side of the terrorists?
To clear up some misconceptions, let's make it clear that we are not, exactly, defending Barry Bonds. Nowhere in anything we've ever written have we said that Barry Bonds could never possibly have used steroids. We weren't born yesterday. There is certainly a large pile of circumstantial evidence to indicate the contrary.
Yes, cheating is wrong. Yes, cheating should be punished. When there is evidence that someone broke the rules, we punish them. And in doing so we follow the legal processes established for such proceedings.
As much as we love baseball, in the overall scheme of the world it's really not that big of a deal. But the issue involved here is a very big deal. It's symptomatic of a large, growing, and very dangerous problem in this country: our justice system has been turned on its head.
The principles that this country was founded on included a rule of law which held, among other things, that sufficient evidence was required to convict someone beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a person has the right to face his or her accusers, that one cannot be convicted of or punished for committing an act that was not a crime at the time it was committed, and finally, that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
I guess that those ideals must be so 9/10. Why bother with old-school formalities like law; can't you see that they are all guilty? Of what? Of whatever we accuse them of, of course.
When I was just a lad, I learned in school that one of the things that made America so great, what set us apart from totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was that they conducted show trials, kangaroo courts in which the accused were automatically guilty. I guess my civics teachers didn't have their facts straight.
A large part of the "evidence" that is being used against Bonds is leaked Grand Jury testimony from the BALCO case. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Grand Jury testimony supposed to be confidential, and isn't it a felony to release it? Ah, I'm being all 9/10 again. Stupid inconvenient laws! Ignore them, they were written by guys who didn't understand our modern world.
The issue here is not, "did Barry Bonds use steroids?" The issue is, "is the rule of law that our country was founded on collapsing?" The evidence I'm seeing, from the Bonds case to Guantanemo Bay, says that it is.
To clear up some misconceptions, let's make it clear that we are not, exactly, defending Barry Bonds. Nowhere in anything we've ever written have we said that Barry Bonds could never possibly have used steroids. We weren't born yesterday. There is certainly a large pile of circumstantial evidence to indicate the contrary.
Yes, cheating is wrong. Yes, cheating should be punished. When there is evidence that someone broke the rules, we punish them. And in doing so we follow the legal processes established for such proceedings.
As much as we love baseball, in the overall scheme of the world it's really not that big of a deal. But the issue involved here is a very big deal. It's symptomatic of a large, growing, and very dangerous problem in this country: our justice system has been turned on its head.
The principles that this country was founded on included a rule of law which held, among other things, that sufficient evidence was required to convict someone beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a person has the right to face his or her accusers, that one cannot be convicted of or punished for committing an act that was not a crime at the time it was committed, and finally, that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
I guess that those ideals must be so 9/10. Why bother with old-school formalities like law; can't you see that they are all guilty? Of what? Of whatever we accuse them of, of course.
When I was just a lad, I learned in school that one of the things that made America so great, what set us apart from totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was that they conducted show trials, kangaroo courts in which the accused were automatically guilty. I guess my civics teachers didn't have their facts straight.
A large part of the "evidence" that is being used against Bonds is leaked Grand Jury testimony from the BALCO case. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Grand Jury testimony supposed to be confidential, and isn't it a felony to release it? Ah, I'm being all 9/10 again. Stupid inconvenient laws! Ignore them, they were written by guys who didn't understand our modern world.
The issue here is not, "did Barry Bonds use steroids?" The issue is, "is the rule of law that our country was founded on collapsing?" The evidence I'm seeing, from the Bonds case to Guantanemo Bay, says that it is.
posted by Jim at
10:40 AM
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