A Plea Bargain At Any Price [Sep 23, 2003]

Several stories have been lost in the media frenzy over President Bush's noble and controversial stand against the sexual enslavement of children. I thought I'd spend today summarizing a couple that affect me, not personally, but emotionally. After all, an emotional response to the news is so rare these days. Let's not make the same mistake as the French and everyone else in the world by actually thinking about the news. We must react, and do so with blind, violent decisiveness. That's why we have a Constitution.

I'm very proud, for instance, by Attorney General John Ashcroft's recent dictum to virtually eliminate plea bargains in federal criminal cases. I've long argued in this space that our justice system contains far too much nuance, and Ashcroft's decision guarantees that everyone in America who's charged with a federal crime will go to jail for a very long time, if not forever. Hooray!

Perhaps this means the final curtain for Faith Fippinger, a 62-year-old former schoolteacher who dared to travel to Iraq during the war as a "human shield." The government is charging her with violating U.S. "trade" sanctions against Iraq, and they also seem upset that she engaged in such terrorist-type activities as teaching in schools and volunteering in hospitals. Here's hoping that the government silences this insane voice as quickly as possible so she can stop prattling on about the Iraqi "people" who "died horribly" during the war. I've said it before here and I'll say it again: Informed dissent has no place in a functioning democracy.

Another emotion I felt yesterday was joy. That's because my dear friend Silvio Berlusconi, the grand archduke of the Italian territories, received an award from the Anti-Defamation League because of his strong support for Israel. The so-called Nobel Laureates who are condeming the honor whine that Berlusconi claimed recently in an interview that Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone." Really, what's the big deal in saying something like that? Why wouldn't a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals and media executives want to honor a backhanded Holocaust denier? The award, to me, shows just how far we've come since World War II. Rupert Murdoch, my friend and publisher, once said that Hitler would have made an "interesting dinner companion," but that didn't stop him from winning the Jew Of The Year Award in 1999, even though he's not Jewish.

I guess what I'm saying is, oh, hell, you all know what I'm saying.

Tomorrow, I cease my incessant focus on current events and really go all out in pimping my new novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, which according to Amazon is the 82,262nd most popular book in America right now. We all know that numbers lie. Buy your copy now.