Wednesday Olio: I Don't Care, 'Cause I'm All Right Edition

• "Why are we supposed to have sympathy for rapists?"

We aren't.

Williams' point is that justice needs to be tempered with mercy, which, y'know, fills out the column inches, tells us nothing we did not know before the plague of the cellphone, and has nothing to do with the Steubenville Case, where two young men were tried as juveniles, which is mercy enough for most people.

The reason we were asked to feel for the loss of football glory is a helluva lot more important story than what's left of Christian charity. What counts as news is largely determined by how it affects the upper and upper-middle classes who report it. The sort of people who have, for the last thirty-five years, anyway, seen property rights as superior to personal rights. And whose sons and daughters occupy an analogous position to the Big Red football team in Steubenville, except with more expensive cars and cellphones: Above the Law.

Meanwhile, a drunken slut is just a drunken slut. Unless she's your daughter, probably.

No, Candy Crowley is certainly no rape apologist. She's just another shill for the dominant Rich Man's version of reality, in which the laws are for you and your'n, not him and his'n, and the energetic young Bootstrapper or Cleatlacer is worth twelve riffs and a dozen raffs.

(And by the way, whatever godawful program my Poor Wife was listening to last night replayed Crowley's comments with an ugly edit removing "essentially" in "found guilty of rape, essentially."  I guess that one couldn't be explained away.)

•  "What Republicans Mean When They Accuse Tom Perez of 'Paying a $180 Million Bribe' ".

They mean they've found a ball of shit, with chunks of Th' Reverse Racism, and an Obama nominee to hurl it at. Savings: 763 words.

• Lord, speaking of Weigel, won't some wingnut sinecure take him away while he's still sentient? Sheesh:

Plenty of journalists have used this anniversary, 10 years since the invasion of Iraq, to reflect on whether they got it right. I wasn't a professional journalist at the time -- I was a 21-year old college student -- but I found a way to absolutely get it wrong. My mistake was to believe the official stories of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and of the Bush administration's plans and cost estimates. The lesson I took away from this? Never trust these people. Never trust official estimates. Always question the agenda behind any government campaign.

You were an upperclassman at an academically-respected private university, editor of the Conservative-Libertarian scandal sheet, and it was sometime later you learned the government might lie to you. To promulgate a war. With dummied-up intel and assurances from Mitch Daniels which were widely discredited. But you "[could] read the same information…and come to different conclusions." The wrong ones. Have you gone back since to look for that trail of breadcrumbs reaching back to the Cold War? Or the Republican war on the New Deal? Maybe your takeaway should'a been to question yourself a little closer, Dave. Don't trust the government? Unless it's Michele Bachmann, dazzling the Republican primary debates? Or Rand Paul, filibustering scintillatingly? Trust the Anti-Government government?

• Speaking of The Bantam Menace, the Rapping has come to the Midwest:

I think it's his best work. Since Iraq, at least.