I need closure with Jemele Hill.
I can't ignore Jemele when she talks about O.J. Simpson, I just can't do it. I was originally going to put a different heading to this post with the words David Duke in it, but since "Hiel Hitler" (thanks to Jemele Hill) is a search term that brings up our blog, I decided not to chance it. So now the word "Communist" will bring up our blog. Perfect! Let's go with one sentence pithy (which means lots of run on sentences) replies today since I am too tired to give Jemele Hill all my energy.
I'm supposed to believe the O.J. Simpson guilty verdict is a purging.
No one I have heard has ever said that but maybe I need to listen better.
It supposedly represents America collectively issuing a makeup call for 1995 by rendering a judgment that could send the 61-year-old Simpson to prison for much of the rest of his life.
O.J. Simpson is a punchline and I could truly care less whether he ever goes to jail again or not, I really don't care, just don't accuse all of America of trying to get back at him for being acquitted 13 years ago.
But I don't believe any of that was accomplished last week in Las Vegas.
Jemele Hill loves to start her columns off with an incredibly wrong premise she believes is true, and then just build and build upon it, then prove it wrong, so it is kind of like if I said, "Most of America thinks that Tony Romo looks retarded but I think it just shows how intolerant we are as a society."
(In Sports Illustrated last week it said Tony Romo was Latino...what????????)
All this verdict does is prove that race, wealth and celebrity are just as relevant in 2008 as they were in 1995, when Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
This is false, because only one person in this case had wealth and celebrity, which means O.J. Simpson would have been acquitted again.
In response to the guilty verdict, David Cook, the attorney who represents Goldman's father Fred, said: "Is this closure for Fred Goldman? No. Is this closure for America? Yes."
Jemele Hill thinks Fred Goldman's attorney speaks for the entire United States.
With all due respect to Cook, it's not closure for me, because I accepted O.J.'s acquittal 13 years ago.
What a shock, she creates a false premise and then disagrees with the false premise she created.
"I think it's closure for traditional white America," said Dr. Carl Taylor, a sociologist at Michigan State. "[For African-Americas], this won't be a closure.
What is traditional white America and why do I get the feeling Dr. Carl Taylor does not know who this is either?
It will be an opening. It will be ripping the wound open."
Jemele Hill is proud to try and rip open the wound even further and I have gotten a feeling that African Americans that aren't looking for an article to write don't care, but I may be wrong.
Given the reaction to the verdict, the case is clouded by a strong odor of payback and revenge.
Absolutely, Las Vegas police and attorneys were just waiting for O.J. to barge into someone's hotel/casino and steal memorabilia items at gunpoint.
Maybe you're fine with that, but I'm not.
I am fine with him being arrested for allegedly committing a crime, being prosecuted for said crime, and being tried in front of a jury of his peers...alas, the legal system, so yes, I am fine with this.
O.J.'s imprisonment wasn't Al Capone being nabbed for tax evasion, because that took thought, planning, precision and the FBI collecting a litany of evidence.
I was also fine with O.J. getting off at the original trial, but just because this crime did not require a lot of planning did not make it non-serious.
The caper that undid O.J. was engineered by a bunch of buffoons and amateur criminals, who were given a high degree of credibility in a court of law.
If it were engineered by actual engineers who graduated college and had committed several professional crimes, then Jemele would have no problem with it, but unfortunately many criminals that get caught are not that bright, so this can't be the case all the time.
There are also serious questions about whether the jury was unbiased. According to an Associated Press report, five of the 12 jurors -- all of whom were white -- wrote in their questionnaires they disagreed with the 1995 verdict, and several others didn't even answer the question.
Jemele Hill, though well versed in bullshit, is not aware of the term "peremptory challenge," which means the defense could have potentially not had these jurors on the jury to begin with, so that is his defense team's fault, besides aren't the questionnaires supposed to be confidential?
The "experts" now predict O.J. will spend the rest of his life in jail, which is an interesting leap when you consider that Simpson will come to his December sentencing with a clean criminal record.
The same "experts" she is mocking are the same "experts" who are saying that this is payback for traditional white America and things like that, but please ignore that.
But life in prison for sports memorabilia? Life, when many witnesses who testified in the trial had rap sheets that could carpet a 2,000-square-foot home? Bobby Brown has been arrested eight times -- including once for sexual battery and another time for getting into a violent altercation with ex-wife Whitney Houston -- and he has never even done more than a month in jail.
Life is not fair Jemele and the quicker you learn this the better your shitty writing is going to be and besides, what the hell is O.J. doing hanging out with these people if he is trying to not go afoul of the law?
Maybe O.J. wouldn't be in this mess if, instead of stealing cable and having bouts of road rage, he had moved to Paraguay and become a soybean exporter.
He would also not be in this mess if he took his $22,000/month pension and played golf all day, avoided the public and tried like hell to just become a normal citizen, but he did not do that.
Still, the reaction to Simpson's guilty verdict is just more of the same irrational, often racist, hatred that has dogged him for years.
I have watched CNN and other news networks for days now and have no idea what you are talking about, but I very well could be missing the hatred you speak of.
You wouldn't know it now, but O.J. was once considered one of the greatest running backs to ever play. Some think O.J., who won the Heisman Trophy at USC and later became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards with the Buffalo Bills, was better than Jim Brown.
I do know it, have known it and do remember it, but this has nothing to do with what you are talking about.
It always was considered appropriate to refer to O.J. as a murderer, even though the law says otherwise. Yet no one would dare still call William Kennedy Smith a rapist. And Smith also settled a civil suit after being accused by another woman of sexual assault.
Why in the fucking hell are you saying no one calls William Kennedy Smith a rapist, I think he is a rapist, so please do more research other than ask one guy at Michigan State before you start mouthing out what you think everyone's opinion is.
Last year, O.J. was asked to leave a restaurant in Louisville, Ky., the night before the Kentucky Derby because his presence was supposedly unnerving the customers. Meanwhile, Phil Spector and Robert Blake apparently dine unbothered.
I think they are both murderers, I am not the only one, and I am sure at some point they have been asked to leave a restaurant.
Here is a reaction to the Robert Blake result by a WHITE prosecutor:
Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, commenting on this ruling, called Blake a "miserable human being" and the jurors "incredibly stupid."
Notice he was not hugging his friends and white America was not celebrating this trial.
Phil Spector was also not even found guilty or innocent, there was a mistrial, so he is going to possibly be convicted when he is tried again.
In early December 2007, it was announced that San Francisco lawyer Doron Weinberg had agreed to serve as Spector's attorney and had proposed that the retrial begin in September 2008. The only remaining member of Spector's defense team is Christopher Plourd, who Weinberg told Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler will not be available to resume the case until the autumn of 2008.
"The public reacted more angrily to the acquittal in this case than the public would ever react to the execution of an innocent person," Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told PBS' "Frontline" during a special retrospective on O.J.'s murder case a couple years ago.
People also reacted much more favorably and excited to the verdict than you would a normal acquittal, which is why this was such a highly emotional case, but still has very little to do with the new conviction of Simpson.
Dershowitz was a member of Simpson's defense team in 1995. "This was taken personally by whites in America in a way that no other case ever affected them. This was somehow a legitimation of the pent-up racism that I think Americans have had to hold back since the 1950s."
He is clearly a neutral observer on this issue and you would think that Jemele would not want to get a quote from a man who defended the Phil Spector and Robert Blake of the 90's, Claus von Bulow, and got him acquitted for a crime that many think he actually committed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_von_B%C3%BClow
This conviction seems to have stirred up plenty of feelings. None of which is closure.
You are stirring up feelings, everyone else in the world is over this, including the prosecutor, judge, and jury that convicted O.J. for his most recent crime, and it is not revenge or payback simply because that is how you want it to be. God, I hate talking race.
My favorite part(what pisses me off the most that my head almost explodes) is how Jemele takes such offense and seems to get high and mighty when Fred Goldbloom's attorny speaks for all of America. Then a few lines later, uses "experts" speaking for all of America to try to prove her point. The hypocrisy drives me crazy. I started to break down this article myself it pissed me of so much, and I don't have anything to do with it. Ahhhhh.
ReplyDeleteI know, that is one of my favorite parts as well, and why I tried to keep it short. I could have written 10,000 words about this topic. She becomes a complete hypocrite when trying to prove any point that she needs proven. It is beyond annoying and what makes her so frustrating to millions of readers.
ReplyDeleteShe actually frustrates me so much I don't ever try to tackle her columns.