As an individual human being would you ever knowingly assist a rapist in evading justice by verbally assaulting and traumatizing a child rape victim under any circumstances that did not involve you or someone you care for being harmed because it was customary and you had agreed to when you were in your 20’s?
Don’t answer with a society answer. Answer as an individual human being making a singular choice one time.
You want the defense attorney to drop the ball so that the guy has a clear shot at having the sentence overturned?
Especially if there’s no absolutely 100% incontrovertible proof that he did it?
I want everyone in the justice system to take their roles seriously. That’s my answer.
That’s because that question is not pertinent to the argument at hand.
You said, basically, “Hillary is not a saint, because she did these horrible things: enabling her husband’s behaviour, and questioning a rape victim harshly as a defense attorney.”
No one here is actually arguing that she’s a saint, so the only part of that statement that we can argue against are whether the things that you say are horrible are actually horrible.
And that’s what we’ve been doing (ignoring the “enabling” part for the large part, because, whether you’re right or wrong about her husband, you’re clearly wrong about the “defense attorney” bit).
Now, as to whether Hillary is “morally good:” I try very hard not to make that kind of judgement about people (admittedly, Trump makes that very difficult in his particular case), because I don’t know what’s really going on in their heads. Morality, in my estimation, is as much about why you do something as it is about what you’re actually doing.
So, to answer your question about whether I think Hillary is “a good person:” I have nowhere near the amount of information that I would need to make that determination. Or, to put it another way, I try to think of everybody as “a good person” without overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see Trump, above). If I did decide to abandon my normal presumption of goodness and try to make a determination about the actual moral content of her character, I don’t think that “doing her job and sworn duty as a defense attorney” is going to move the needle much in either direction.
So much avoidance.
“Yes, the dignity of a child whom I believe is a victim means less to me than the service to a system that sometimes prevents an innocent from going to jail.”
If you’re going to pragmatically defend someone you personally believe to be a rapist by berating his victim you should own it.
these words don’t reflect who I am
Nice nonpology there. And those words reflect exactly who he is, which is why they’re such a big problem. Of course it won’t affect the support of the deplorables, but not going well with the undecideds.
Other things I want, btw, I’d like it if a cop let someone go for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family.
Tell me about how that cop let society down.
Tel Valjean to his sad French face how he got what he deserved.
A shit-ton of money, a secure life for his loving, devoted, adopted daughter, and clemency from the man hunting him down after saving that man’s life?
I’m sure Valjean would agree that his reward, in the end, exceeded his punishment, and that Javert did nothing wrong.
There’s nothing that I blame you for.
You’ve done your duty, nothing more.
And he even offered to turn himself in and do more prison time no fewer than three times after he broke his parole.
Not sure why we’re talking about fictional characters, though.
He was very into film criticism.
Probably many French films, where they indeed not capitalise adjectives. Or let’s say, nationalities, nouns are.
We can laugh until Trump steps down, Pence becomes the candidate, and there’s no time to get his egregious record into the public psyche or have Clinton debate him before the election.
Every time someone on the left trots out a right-wing talking point, a kitten dies. This election cycle there are dead kittens all over the place.
Because fiction allows people to read a human truth that politics prevent historians from recording.
And the truth is you and I would have more faith in humanity if Jean had never been arrested in the first place. Just because a victim understand the plight of their victimizer and forgives them does not mean their treatment was a moral good.
I personally have enough faith in the intellect and perception of Sec. Clinton to believe her when she stated that she was convinced in her client’s guilt that had she quietly sabotaged the case she would have been doing so in service of a higher moral good. Now you might believe differently, that she had no such authority as an individual. Ok, as POTUS she will have (and use) the authority to execute people who have not been convicted in a court of law, she will have the authority to bypass the federal courts to release those who have been so convicted, to theoretically cause the deaths of millions. All of this as an individual setting policy not following established policy, all of this as an individual decision maker and leader, all of this without ever meeting or interacting with those she orders killed or those she orders freed. She’s clear to do this, but she lacked the competence to defy law and convention and make an individual choice secretly once in 1975? In a case where she had personally interacted with all parties?
Btw, I’m glad that her failure to throw the case has prevented the justice system from finding innocent people guilty or prevented even one innocent person from going to jail. <-----Also “fictional characters”.
Do you think the guy chopping hands off in a public square on the Arabian Peninsula is doing his part? I mean if that person refused to do the job someone else would do it and he’s probably get in trouble and even if he knows the person getting chopped isn’t guilty I mean what can you do? You have to do the right thing and chop that hand off. As The Rock would say “Know Your Role, Jabroni.”
Traumatizing a child even for a cause I actually believe in turns my stomach. I am suspicious of anyone capable of rationalizing their way into treating a victim like that.
I thought denying our past mistakes and hypocrisy was something we accuse Republicans and Texas textbooks of.
If we pretend she didn’t do shitty stuff just because we’re unable to discern between a little shitty and a lot of incredibly shitty that’s like saying “Guy’s I think we might be too dumb and shallow to be honest with ourselves about ourselves.”.
It also is anti-aspirational. Don’t call yourself a progressive if 8 years of Hillary is the most optimistic thing you can imagine rather than 4 and a shift to the Left.
We disagree on an ethical principle here. A defense attorney is not a judge. They are not a prosecutor. They are not a jury. It’s not their role to make the decision on guilt and innocence in the legal system and it’s a major violation of legal ethics to do so. I absolutely consider a defense attorney subverting their role, violating legal ethics, and failing to defend someone’s Constitutional rights as a major and serious failure of justice on multiple levels, and in my hierarchy of values justice is really high up there. I’d far rather see people whose job is to protect people’s rights do their job every single time than to do so selectively.
If he does, it won’t be soon.
Pretending he did in a few weeks, if it happened I can’t see it doing anything but creating a mess of epic proportions guaranteeing a Pence loss.
And for this, you would immediately be sanctioned by the court and submitted to a disciplinary proceeding.You don’t run around calling former clients guilty before they’ve been convicted, and you certainly don’t do so when you’ve had access to information through privilege.
Meanwhile, do you know what happens if no lawyer represents a defendent in our system? They walk away free. You cannot conduct a trial without a defense. Someone has to do that job. Simply smearing anyone who has ever had to do it doesn’t make anything better, or improve justice in any way.
Trump will never let go of the (non-consensually grabbed) pussy.
She didn’t make a mistake.
Why do you think you even know this story? People like Ailes and Breitbart and Limbaugh have spent decades deliberately researching and stockpiling stories that could look bad for her, and put them out there for people like you to repeat. You can’t do anything for Clinton’s morality (assuming there is any problem with it) but you can do something about yourself. Please stop being an enabler for the worst dregs of the extreme right.
If you want to judge Clinton’s morality, please supplement these right-wing scare stories with a reading of It Takes a Village and Hard Choices, and look at what her charities have done (not only the ones she funds, but also the ones she started, going back to the 70s).
Do I think she’s a saint? Of course not (and if I thought she was a saint I wouldn’t vote for her). Do I think she’s a good person? Yes, yes I do.
[quote=“nemomen, post:117, topic:87048”]
Pretending he did [drop out] in a few weeks, if it happened I can’t see it doing anything but creating a mess of epic proportions guaranteeing a Pence loss.[/quote]
Unfortunately, I think it will make Pence an attractive option for all those people who think they hate Clinton. The basket of deplorables will either stay home or vote for Pence, progressive Democrats will either stay home or vote for the least qualified person in the race because they hate Clinton, all the straying Republicans will return to the fold, and someone whose politics are even worse than Cruz will slide home in a landslide.
Wouldn’t it be a pragmatic subversion of a system in service of the moral principle of justice upon which the legal system claims to be based and from which it derives authority?
Extraordinary people do extraordinary things. Following the rules doggedly isn’t extraordinary at all. It’s rather unimaginative.
