Turkey pardon? How about pardons for jailed innocent people instead?

By David McElroy · November 23, 2011

Barack Obama pardoned a couple of turkeys named Liberty and Peace this morning, sparing them from becoming Thanksgiving dinner for someone on Thursday. This lighthearted tradition is good holiday PR, but it must ring hollow with the human beings in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Some presidents have used pardons in questionable ways, such as the flurry of 140 pardons granted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office. In Clinton’s case, many of the people involved had personal or political connections to Clinton or other Democrats. That’s still not as many as the 204 people who Richard Nixon pardoned in one day near the end of his checkered time in office. (And remember that Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his Watergate-related crimes even before Nixon was charged.) More recently, George W. Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence was controversial because Libby was an administration official convicted of leaking information for political purposes.

The evidence is clear that presidents don’t mind using pardons to help their friends and politically connected associates, so why aren’t they willing to use the power to help people in this country who are in prison despite the fact that it’s clear they’re innocent?

If you don’t believe we have a problem with wrongfully convicted people, you’re wrong. That’s not an opinion. It’s a fact. We have example after example of people who have spent years in prison despite not having been guilty of the crimes they were convicted of. If you’d like details, you’ll find plenty of harrowing examples at the website of the Innocence Project, which works to help release people who are demonstrably innocent.

My best guess is that presidents don’t use their constitutional pardon power to help innocent people because they’re afraid of looking soft on crime. After all, the people they do grant pardons to are generally nice upper-middle class people who look “safe” on the news. Many of the innocent are black or Hispanic or poor — and many look the part of thugs. So presidents play it safe. They release the smiling people in coats and ties. They let the poor and minorities rot in prison.

The next time you see a smiling president and happy children at the annual Thanksgiving day turkey pardon, remember that there are human beings who deserve to be there instead of the turkeys.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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