Posted by
strikemepinkifidontthink.com on Monday, March 17, 2008 6:40:27 PM
I usually consecrate this space to the discussion of one subject only each week, going from its earthly manifestations to its cosmological significance and disposing of it for a reasonable length of time. Recently, however, there has been such a rush of events, all forcing themselves on one’s attention, that concentration goes by the board and diversification takes over.
The first shocker we’ve seen of course is the Spitzer affair. All details are known by now, and some are a bit disappointing. It seems that the ladies involved weren’t all beauty queens as advertised, but sometimes just females who were available for duty on short notice, but not really dreamboats, One thing stands out, though. Spitzer was advised that he was being sent an “American girl” which is kind of inspiring when you think about it.
It’s still a bit of a mystery how his name came up at all, but that was the chance he took when he decided no one was tapping his phone and when he tried structuring his payments to keep them under the $10,000 reportable amount. When I was working in a bank in the Eighties that was already a hot button getting close attention, which only increased since 9/11.
All the same, Alan Dershowitz, one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers, thinks the investigation should have been called off once it was determined that Spitzer wasn’t doing anything but calling up for dates as in high school. Defense attorneys think that way. By them the right time to terminate investigations is before they start. However great oaks from little acorns grow and sometimes small incidents have big results, e.g:
The French Connection case started with two detectives in a nightclub wondering where the Brooklyn guy at the next table got all the money he was spending.
The case of Colonel Abel, the Russian spy posing as a photographer in Brooklyn, came to light only because a hollowed-out coin containing microfilm fell out of a pocket in a suit he’d left for dry cleaning.
Sometimes nothing at all can be a clue. Sherlock Holmes once told Watson that he was concerned about “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” “The dog did nothing in the nighttime” blurted Watson. “That was the curious incident” said Holmes. It meant that the dog knew the person who sneaked into the stable and stole the Derby favorite.
Sherlock had plenty of nothing and nothing was plenty for him. He wasn’t the kind of fellow to call off an investigation once it started and neither were the boys from the IRS. Just because there was a big name involved. In fact it’s been noted that IRS is inclined to break its big-name cases in the month of March just when people are making out their tax returns. One year it was John Wayne, other times it was comparable people, but the message was always the same, “Look out!” Spitzer didn’t.
Skipping to another topic as promised, I will mention an “epiphany” that came to me the other night. The word quoted is a hip substitute for “revelation,” and doesn’t mean something miraculous has happened to me. The light dawned as I was watching Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” on an oldies channel. It was a wartime picture and Humphrey’s character was doing his bit as a Caribbean boat captain. This brought him into conflict with Vichy French characters in charge of the French West Indies. Once more, as in “Casablanca” Humphrey teamed up with the Free French to thwart their evil plans.
The picture climaxed with Humphrey trapping the Vichyites in a hotel room and demanding information from one of them. He is refused and, well, the next thing he starts to do is to pistol-whip the fellow to get the information. Whap! Whap! go Hmphrey’s wallops as the man’s head bobs from side to side from the impact. Finally he cracks and gives up his information.
What’s wrong with this picture? What does it remind you of? Yeah, that’s right, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and all that. Torture, in other words. The unforgivable crime today, as we know. Condemned by the Civil Liberties Union, the mainstream media, the church, you name it. All the progressive people in fact. But somehow Humphrey’s infractions escaped them. In fact others followed them right up to the present day. Out of interrogation scenes in thousands of movies I present a couple more, because I haven’t seen the others:
“The Day of the Jackal.” French police interrogate a suspect in an assassination plot against President DeGaulle. They do it by applying electrodes to his genitals and activating them to get answers. They get one but no more because the prisoner dies from the shock. The late William Buckley took note of the lack of horror anti-torture activists exhibited in this case. He concluded that it was because the anti-Gaullists were identified as crypto-fascists, not progressives, and so undeserving of sympathy.In “Guarding Tess,” a recent movie, Nicholas Cage, a Secret Service bodyguard for a President’s kidnapped widow, solves the case by shooting off the toe of a suspect while promising to do more of the same unless he talks. He talks. Oh yes, his victim was a Democratic widow, not a Republican, so he deserved what he got.
So, with all the indignation that progressives generate about alleged torture applied to enemy combatants to elicit information, we see that the Civil Liberties Union, for example, which was in being when all these movies were made, has never bothered to criticize them. I don’t happen to believe that much torture has been done by our forces in Iraq or elsewhere, but where it has been I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the perpetrators should claim they were inspired by Hollywood in carrying them out. That would be free-lancers like the Abu Ghraib crowd, not intelligence officers. In any case Hollywood and the ACLU are not reliable guides in this area. The clear indications are that they practice selective indignation so that when it comes to torture all men are not equal. Doing it to leftists is an outrage; doing it to rightists…so we all make mistakes.