Eminent Domain

This is just too much. I shouldn't be shocked by this column. It was written by Joel McNally, and rational thoughts from McNally are as frequent as visits from Haley's Comet. McNally goes after Judge Michael Brennan for his sentencing of the tire slashers. It starts off wonderfully...

Milwaukee Circuit Judge Michael Brennan said he wanted to send a message with his sentence. And he sure did.

The message Brennan sent was this: Drunken white police officers who savagely beat and torture a black man may go free in Milwaukee, but young black men who commit acts of vandalism will go to jail.

This is the stupidest argument that's been flying around lately. Brennan had nothing to do with the Jude case. He had no control over what the jury did. Yet these two incidents keep getting linked. Why? They are totally separate crimes. I guess that because the cops got off in the Jude case that no one can ever be convicted of a crime again in Milwaukee County. The wheels of justice must grind to a halt now. It's a judicial holiday from now until the feds act on the Jude case. Anyone who makes this argument is just demagoguing.

It gets worse...

Some people suspect there was another message Brennan also wanted to send: White voters of Wisconsin, if you don't like uppity young blacks, vote for Michael Brennan for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Uppity young blacks? Are you kidding me? I think that Lewis Caldwell would be interested to know that he is an "uppity young black". Isn't McNally's view of crime interesting? He doesn't think that we should be concerned about what these men did. It's a minor crime according to McNally. And if you citizens think that Judge Brennan was right here, you're probably racists. If you were a noble, tolerant liberal like McNally, you would be defending these poor young men from The Man.

McNally doesn't even think that the rented vans were going to be used to drive voters to the polls...

Republican voters usually don'’t need rented vans to get to the polls. Republican voters drive their own enormous SUVs or possibly ride to the polls in the back of limousines lighting cigars with $100 bills.

This is McNally trying to be funny. It's a way to direct readers away from the fact that his point is pretty stupid. It's not the Thomas Nast-esque lumber baron Republican voters that need a lift to the polls. It's the older folks who don't have a way to get around on their own. McNally might be shocked by this, but there are some senior citizens that vote Republican. They might need rides to the polls on a brisk November day.

McNally then offers his totally unbiased anecdotal evidence as a poll watcher, saying that he saw "teams of lawyers and other party operatives dispatched to challenge and intimidate black voters". You can translate that as "people trying to try to keep the election clean and lawful". Then the Office Space Jump to Conclusions Mat comes out...

If the real purpose of the Republican van fleet was to intimidate voters, those young vandals may have inadvertently thwarted a Republican attempt to interfere with voting in Milwaukee just as they were accused of doing in Ohio and Florida.

They weren't criminals! Those young men are civil rights heroes! There's no real proof for this, but who cares?!

This column is indicative of why I use the Shepherd Express as a coaster or swatting instrument for insect eradication. It's useless otherwise.