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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 24 January 2010

I have mixed feelings about the big dust-up over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The heavily favored Republican candidate, Scott Brown, is a no-tax goober and former Cosmo pin-up boy (no, really) who comes across as Mitt Romney without the “Klaatu barada niktu” quality; he claims to fall somewhere on the more reasonable end of the “pro-lifer” scale and loves to talk about his eagerness to serve as a loyal soldier in the fight against health care reform. And he has been aided immeasurably by the flagrant incompetence of the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who seems to have never expected to find herself in anything resembling a real race. There are plenty of reasons for not wanting to vote for Coakley, though for me, the deal-breaker is the role she played in extending the suffering of Gerald Amirault, one of the many victims of the wave of day care sex abuse scandals that swept the country in the 1980s and early ’90s as part of the larger Satanic-abuse/recovered-memory hoax. I hate to sound like a single issue voter, but anyone who had a toe in any of these prosecutions—and thought Coakley came into the Amirault case lately, she waded in at least up to her waist—belongs under a jail somewhere, not in elected office. At the very least, Coakley, like the prosecutors and judges who fight the release of men who DNA evidence has cleared of the crimes that placed them on Death Row, and even insist on the guilt of men who DNA evidence has exonerated of their crimes after they’d been executed, believes that keeping up the pretense that the system worked is more important than maintaining the standard, often cited by no less an authority than Jack McCoy as the cornerstone of our legal system, that it is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that a single innocent man be convicted and imprisoned. Phil Nugent

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