Junto Boys

PBS - FRONTLINE

It was once said that a conservative is a liberal that was mugged. It’s easy to conclude that no one at the PBS show FRONTLINE has been mugged. Tuesday’s show was on the injustice of sentencing Juvenile murders to life without parole. Ten years ago they would have produced a show on juvenile murders getting the death penalty and had experts tell you why they should instead get life sentences.

The parents and siblings of the perps are shown distraught that their loved one will spend the rest of their lives behind bars. One rich Denver couple cannot even take a winter home in the sunshine because they will miss their Sunday prison visits. A sister of another shooter cries on camera, “why would they do this, it was an accident?” Defense attorneys have never seen such a sad kid as the defendant. Calm law school professors say that it serves no purpose other than vengeance.

On the other side, we have the vindictive parents that insist no matter how many tears or law professors they produce, their son’s killer is not getting out of prison. You see not an ounce of warmth from any of them.

Then the tears from the murderer’s sister again and then law professor again saying that victims have a lot of political power although these tough laws are unjust.

They interview the perps in jail, some of them 8 or 10 years after their crime. They were only 16, how did they know what they were doing? We’re made to feel claustrophobic in their prisons and we’re made to feel lucky that justice didn’t strike down on us so unfairly. It’s tough on their family. It’s cruel. Ah, it’s cruel.

The founders in the constitution came out against “cruel and unusual punishment” and yet the death penalty was legal, because they thought life in prison was cruel not death. I don’t think that was the point FRONTLINE was were trying to make, but they made it anyway.

FRONTLINE took the classic ideological track by finding the most sympathetic convicts they could dig up. The first guy had been in prison for 10 years, he with the Denver parents. He seemed smart and in a bad situation when his friend killed his mother and he said that he was so shocked that he passed out and fell into her pool of blood. Maybe. Another dude who helped the murderer move the body fingered our convict to lighten his own sentence. Mitigating circumstances, I suppose. But what can we really believe? All convicts are innocent, right? They didn’t interview any jurors to get that side.

The second fella shot a high school classmate when he was supposed to sell him his gun. The convict never planned on selling the gun and he even admits it. He was says that he was going to get the money and then skedaddle, but that doesn’t ring true. The victim was an athlete and the thief wasn’t just going to go quietly without chin music. He obviously had to shoot the guy in order to get away with the money. We see him in prison as a religious person who turned a new leaf. The victim’s mother said that he should have found religion earlier.

The third guy is described as a pipsqueak who was ratted out by two confederates after their carjacking escapade resulted in the gunshot death of a 17 year old kid. FRONTLINE was appalled that he was kept in a badass prison in solitary, but even angrier that they weren’t allowed to interview him. They didn’t seem so angry that they couldn’t interview the people who were killed. They did show an older interview taped by Human Rights Watch where the little darling explained that the government’s trump up charge that he was a gang leader got him the tougher prison facility.

We hear psychobabble throughout about how these kids are too young to understand what they were doing. Were interviewers never 16? Did they think that murder was no big deal when they went to school? What is this Leftwing compulsion to write everyone a pass for their abhorrent behavior?

It didn’t work for me. Even the most sympathetic murderers they could find coupled with the coldest victim’s mother couldn’t convince me that the law was wrong. That liberals are quacking means just the opposite, the system is running better than I thought.

James Taranto posted an editorial from the New York Times in which they insisted that terrorists be given a jury trial through our judicial system with lawyers, witnesses, discovery and all the accoutrements crime suspects are use to in our system. Taranto said that he was too lazy to look it up, but he bets he could easily find dozens of cases where the New York Times is indicting our judicial system as unfair and they only prefer it now because it will treat these terrorists easier than a military tribunal.

This is kind of the heart of everything we’re dealing with in the world. There are no bad people to the Left, just opportunities for rehabilitation. That’s why when one of them becomes a victim of terrorism they can’t fathom it. Michael Moore asked why would the terrorists hit blue state New York. They can’t imagine that the angry Islamists are anything but disgruntled liberals taking capitalist injustice into their own hands.

Liberals exist to shake their head at wrong-doing and explain that it’s due to lack of funding to education, job training etc. They can’t be held responsible is either overt or covert, but it’s there time and again. The liberal media is using the historically low casualty rate in Iraq to make the case that we can’t win. They cannot bring themselves to fight or root for their country because they are torn about what their country stands for. A Bush victory anywhere is one point against their world view.

We were hearing a different tune right after 9-11 when liberals had been mugged. They did become conservatives for a short time. But once the heat of the moment wore off, they went back to explaining away all the uncomfortable things that contradict their views of multiculturalism and the military industrial complex. They who were once ready to fight and urged the fight ahead, we’re finding bogeymen in Haliburton and conspiracy theories about how Bush wanted to remake the world. They started saying that he either used Iraq as an excuse or let 9-11 occur so his nefarious plan could move forward.

However you slice it, PBS needs to be kept on the air so we can continue to see where the heart of liberalism lies. Without that pocket of Jacobins, I would hold the belief that we can win this war together when, in truth, too many don’t mind losing.