Informant38

The President was on TV twice at the same time in two different places tonight. He gave an exclusive interview to Bret Hume on FOX. Hume asked him about the 30,000 casualty figure, when he had decided to throw it out there, and why.
The President kept flashing this half-smile, saying something about sometimes you know you just have to give 'em the unexpected, and then he said a few more things in that line and gave a little chuckle.
The President on television chuckling about the mention of 30,000 casualties of a war he commissioned.
Then I saw and heard Tucker Carlson say confidently in response to what I guess was an email on the subject what is the dominant talking point at the moment about the appropriateness of the execution of Stanley Williams - that he never admitted his guilt, and never apologized for his crimes.
The surface of the matter is the murder of 4 people - the Asian relative of one of whom I mistook for a light-skinned black woman when I saw her on television the night of the execution - who were Asian and white.
It's a virtual certainty that if Williams' victims had been young black males with criminal records he wouldn't have been given the death penalty.
Apologizing is an interesting thing in that circumstance.
To someone like Carlson, or the man I saw interviewed who had witnessed the execution live - who said that Williams had tried to intimidate the press by staring them down - to weaker men who are frightened of the power men like Williams carry naturally and without commodified enhancements, that kind of gesture, an apology in the context of a tribunal, being apologized to in that context, is a near-total transfer of power, and is similar to the ritualized forms of sado-masochistic power exchange practiced by the demi-monde.
It isn't an apology so much as it's a formal act of submission.
Submission is something that transfers a great deal of power, and for someone who's devoting most of their personal strength to resisting evil, or what they see as evil, transferring power to that evil in order to avoid death will be seen as surrender and cowardice.
Of course neither Carlson nor the people he speaks to and for think of themselves as being evil, the idea being so outlandish that saying that Williams might see an apology as something like surrender to evil will be met with scorn.
I can't speak for what was in Williams' mind, I know very little about the case obviously, but it's not unlikely that he knew who Mary Turner was, and that he knew her story.
If Tookie Williams had done to his victims what was done to Mary Turner there would have been no question of clemency, even if he had apologized abjectly and profusely.
Cleaning the slate isn't a one-sided affair, especially when it comes to young black males in the United States.
The assumption that Carlson makes, and the people he represents make, is of their own statutory innocence.
Scorn figures high in their strategies of defense when they're confronted with what some of us see as the undeniably real evidence of their own guilt and complicity. Tucker Carlson almost certainly never killed anyone of his own volition. And most of the people he speaks for feel confident they can stand before God and any man and proclaim their innocence with confidence.
When it's pointed out to them that crimes like murder and theft on a vast scale were committed repeatedly and unapologetically in their immediate collective past and are being committed in the immediate present, and that the things they have that they value, their lands, their resources, their prosperity and security, came to them directly as a result of those crimes of murder and theft, they laugh derisively and get angry.
This is the Hollywood stereotype reaction of a serial killer.
Williams' defenders attempted to make the case that he had become an agent of change, that his books and essays were changing lives for the better.
This was met with the same derision. It doesn't matter how much time has passed was the answer.
It doesn't matter how much time has passed, or how changed someone is, what matters is what they did, and how deeply and sincerely they've apologized for it - how much remorse they display.
What Carlson and those he stands for will insist is that this doesn't apply to them. They don't have to show remorse because they haven't done anything wrong - they're innocent.
So the admission of guilt is one-sided.
That's how heinous acts can be accomplished, and their rewards distributed and enjoyed, without the shame that should accompany them.
It's the same as a man saying he's different now, that you should only punish him then, when the crime was committed, in order to be truly fair, not now, because he's changed now, he's someone else.
Or a psychiatrist testifying to multiple personalities inhabiting the one mind, not all of whom knowingly committed the crime.
The serial killer's rationalizing nonsense.
That is in fact the argument, the only argument that's made against the accusation of bestial inhumanity wholesale in the American past, and still at the margins of the American present.
That was then, it was them, not us, now.
The evidence is tidied up and scattered to the four winds, the witnesses intimidated into silence or removed, the guilty go about their lives in silence and time passes. Until the present is so fully invested in its own innocence it's an attack against the foundations of everything solid and secure to bring the accusation, to point to the symmetries of accusation and guilt, to hold up the mirror of complicity.