Pick Your Parallels Carefully

Dealing with stock-issue lefties is sort of like handling four-year-olds. A four-year-old will keep begging for candy long after it's quite clear Dad and Mom are not going to cave in. And a not-that-bright lefty will keep with a line of talking points long after the points' shelf-life has expired.

Which brings us to Eileen Biernat's letter to the editor in today's Strib:

Imagine that there was a break-in at your home and your family was killed. The police knew who did it and assured you that they wouldn't rest until he was captured.

Actually, the thugs who put three bullet holes in my house in 1998 got a pretty perfunctory response from the cops. But I'm not digressing, here; we'll come back to the example in a bit.

Now imagine, five years later, the police tell you they have some good news and some bad news. The good is they captured a guy, bad in his own right, but who had nothing to do with the attack on your family. The bad news is your family's killer is still out there and promising another attack on you and your loved ones.

Would you be relieved?

If I found out that someone who'd killed a bunch of other families was in the jug and waiting on a date with a needle (or even a shiv) I think I'd take some comfort, yes.

Where is our bad guy? Where is Osama Bin Laden? He's the guy who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and while it's nice that Saddam Hussein is out of power, it would also be nice if the government kept its promise to get the guy responsible for nearly 3,000 murders five years ago.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got the wrong guy. Where's Osama Bin Laden?

Ms. Biernat, at least try to stick with your own example. We got a guy that killed hundreds of thousands, and paid for terrorists who killed thousands more in Israel and elsewhere.

There are six billion people on this earth. Care to play "where's Waldo" with one guy among that crowd? More to the point, there are 1.2 billion Moslems, of which maybe 120 million have some sympathy with Bin Laden; figure several million of them will be sympathetic enough to actively assist him. So, Eileen Biernat; how hard to you think it is, finding one guy among several million people who want him not to be found?

We have murderers on the Ten Most Wanted list who went on the lam when I was in high school. The FBI implicitly promised to find Donald Webb. Why have they let us down? And remember, Webb is among a population of 300 million that largely wants him caught.

Finding people who don't want to be found - especially people who not only don't want to be caught, especially when they are phenomenally wealthy - isn't as simple as stomping your feet like a four year old. Like Eileen Biernat is doing.

Oh, and the guys who shot my house (they were shooting at a kid who'd horned in on their drug turf who lived two doors down and was walking by at the time)? The cops never really did anything at all.

But I did. I chased their car for a couple of miles one afternoon. They never showed up again. I'd like to think it's because they realized at least one neighborhood resident was not going to wait for the cops to deal with 'em.

Y'know. As opposed to cutting and running.

Posted by Mitch at September 12, 2006 06:55 AM | TrackBack