Heeeeeeere’s Ariel!

Posted: 2013/08/02 in Stupid criminals


The scary thing
about the Ariel Castro case – he held three women captive as sex slaves for ten years – is how many creepy guys are watching those reports going, “Whoa! You can do that?! Hell, yeah, that’d be worth life in prison!”

They’re probably soundproofing their basements right now, checking to see if that guy has a blog…

HRC-inaugIn 2003 Hillary Clinton was still the new kid on the Senate Armed Services Committee when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified during the Bush administration’s run-up of the war in Iraq.

Under questioning as to why investigators had failed to turn up a single cache of Saddam Hussein’s infamous weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Rumsfeld famously retorted, “The absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.”

If only Hillary had answered, “Sometimes it is,” she could have avoided the blunder that would prove fatal to her initial presidential campaign.

But no one on the committee, nor in the media for that matter, exposed the fallacy in Rumsfeld’s glib response: that if you search everywhere that something could possibly be and you don’t find it, then the only reasonable conclusion is that it doesn’t exist.

The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld axis of evil wanted the nation to conclude that everybody knows Saddam has WMD and therefore the failure to turn them up only proves how fiendishly clever he is, and so he must be destroyed.  (To this day, they fend off reporters’ questions with “All our European allies believed he had them,” as though that constitutes actual justification.)

Lacking a defensible reason not to (i.e., wussing out), Hillary tragically surrendered to this windbag of massive deception (wmd) and voted with the majority of Congress to authorize the war in Iraq.

Fast forward to early 2008 and she held a commanding lead in national polls among all segments of Democratic voters – especially women and blacks – save for the anti-war faction. Then the results of the Iowa caucuses of the Iowa Caucasians came in. Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate, claimed a shocking victory.

Overnight, Clinton’s campaign staff and strategy imploded. Meanwhile, black voters in South Carolina turned to one another and said, “White folks voted for Obama! Good lord, if they can, I can, too.”

And the rest is history. Clinton’s campaign continued its meltdown, as Obama’s gained momentum until the nomination was his.

Moral: Presidential wannabes can’t afford to be cowered by sophomoric aphorisms.

Kayak01

Surely by now you’ve seen this commercial for Kayak.com, the travel search website.

You know, this one — the one where the Asian guy pops up through the black guy’s sweater?

Doesn’t it make you wonder, “Where was he, and what was he doing before he slid up through the other guy’s sweater?”

I mean, it’s a commercial for a company named kayak–why would they have a guy snorkling?

Namely, at what point does just plain stupidity become criminal stupidity?GZdunce

But for the unholy trinity of stupidity, Trayvon Martin would still be living and George Zimmerman would still be living in the same obscurity we’ve all grown weary of him no longer having.

Just how stupid was he? Let me count the ways:

  1. A crimewatch captain just doesn’t do that–follow a suspicious person–it sets a terrible example for other crimewatch volunteers, and the last thing the police need is for you to inject yourself into the incident.
  2. There was zero probability Trayvon Martin or anyone else was about to commit a break-in.  It was 7pm on a big-game Sunday.  It’s THE single time of the week when the most people are home, awake, and paying attention to what’s going on around them.  The break-ins Zimmerman fretted over occurred on weekday afternoons when the fewest people were home. Kick-in-the-door burglars may be unsophisticated, but they’re not stupid (unlike G.Z.).
  3. He goes, “I know a suspicious person when I see one.  By golly, I’m gonna follow him.” Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that his suspect was, in fact, a bad guy. What characteristics do you think of when you think of a dedicated bad guy? Armed? Aggressive? Ill-tempered? Accustomed to settling disputes with violence? Someone I’d like to piss off in a dark alley?

Yes, we have a constitutional right to be stupid, but that stupid?  Compound stupid?  If he’d been any stupider, he could’ve claimed he was incompetent to stand trial.

If even Zimmerman’s stupidity didn’t cross the threshold into the realm of felonious stupidity, I’d rather not find out what does.

And let’s not overlook the collateral stupidity surrounding this case:

  • The millions of eyewitnesses the prosecution failed to call to testify. They all know exactly what happened. If you don’t believe it, just make sure you have a camera and microphone when you ask them, like the cable news networks did.
  • No matter how many times the 9-1-1 tape is played, an endless chorus of fact-retardant Americans persist in testifying that the dispatcher “told Zimmerman to stay in his car.”
  • “Profiling.” Law enforcement agencies profile, and it’s generally illegal. Zimmerman was guilty of stereotyping –tragic, but completely legal for a private citizen.
  • And finally, the maniacally inappropriate knock-knock joke Zimmerman’s defense attorney opened with will forever be included in any Internet list of epic fails.