St. Tookie and Bad old Benedict XVI?

I’m driving tonight and listening to the “all news” station in NYC. And what I am hearing is basically, that the founder of the Crips, on death row and hoping for a stay from the SCOTUS, is being talked about like he’s a saint. They talk about his founding of the gang, as though he’d founded the American Red Cross.

Baldilocks has an extensive and well-written piece on the story.

Leaving aside those who oppose the death penalty for moral/religious reasons, few of you have seemed motivated to move into my South Central LA neighborhood to see what “Tookie” and his Crip co-founder Raymond Lee Washington (who’s burning in Hell right now) have wrought for the last thirty-odd years. And I know that you won’t be choosing to live here anytime soon. That’s understandable; however, don’t tell me that we should coddle these TERRORISTS like “Tookie” and those he created if you don’t have to put up with them. (Okay, you can tell me, but you can expect a barely polite response and that’s if I’m feeling generous.)

Secondly—and this is especially for people like Jeremy: black people are thinking, functioning humans who, when adult and without some actual mental deficiency that they can’t control, are just as responsible for their actions as are members of any other race of people. We’re not murderers by nature (that is, any more than any other set of humans are). Therefore, we don’t need a separate, lower standard of behavior in any area, whether it’s education, employment or criminal justice.

Hollywood stars are – unsurprisingly – weeping into the cameras for poor Tookie, where they couldn’t muster a mist for Terri Shiavo. (HogOnIce is unmoved. So is Noonz Wire. Nor Patterico who notes that Tookie’s victims are all but forgotten in the circus.)

PJM has Schwartzenegger’s decision.

I haven’t commented until now, because frankly, I haven’t completely formed my opinion on the death penalty. I know all the arguements – I think they all have merit – and I have not been able to come to an absolute opinion of my own, and so I say nothing.

But when I heard on the radio the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson talking about Tookie’s “strength” as though he was some sort of martyr (Political Teen has video) I just couldn’t help thinking to myself…when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, he couldn’t BUY this sort of sympathetic coverage. While tonight we hear about how Tookie “did more good than harm,” all we heard last April was that the new pope was a hardcase – relentless and inflexible and probably mean, too.

When I got home, I said all of this to my husband and he – not a man given to scripture quotation – said, “in those days men will call good evil and evil good…”

That’s a thought.

Michelle has the definative round-up,and an update on the freak show, and Kevin has a good one, too. And Ed Morrissey writes with passion and fire.

But honestly, this reportage!

WELCOME: Captains Quarters readers and Michelle Malkin readers! While you’re please look around – today we talked about a lot of things, including How Maureen Dowd wrote the wrong book, Rush Limbaugh’s winning round at court, why Hillary does not have to speak and how the world still wants to kill Jesus.