Getting Off Easy

Slobodan Milosevic is dead. He was found dead in his cell, apparently dead of natural causes at the age of 64.

It is questionable if anything could have been done to him to make up for the severity of the crimes he committed or instigated in former Yuugoslavia. It is unlikely that any judicial proceeding based on our own high moral standards could have circumvented the man's grandstanding shenanigans in the court or handed down a sentence truly befitting someone so evil. There is a belief, in certain circles, that people who do the things that he did are simply mentally ill, that they suffer from some horrific mental imbalance that precludes their being able to recognize the evil that they are doing (and therefore stopping it). This school of thought is beatific and morally justifiable, but it ends with people like this confined to a cell for the rests of their lives as a ward of the state.

The proper response to what Milosevic did is, after a careful examination of the facts, to take him out back and shoot him in the head. Short of sending him to Abu Ghraib or the general population of a Turkish prison, this is the only sort of sentence that makes sense.

Granted, it is a little suspicious that he died of natural causes at the age of 64 in a prison cell in The Hague, under the supervision of doctors who were working hard to make sure he stayed healthy enough to serve out his sentence. (And please, let's not get into the bit where the Russians were willing to treat him in Russia; what, you can't get excellent health care in the Netherlands? Ridiculous.)

I'm going to end with a quote from Hajra Catic of the Association of Srebrenica mothers, a group that had the most reason to see him suffer: "However, it seems that God punished him already."

Aborted Attempt

It has become fashionable among opponents of abortion to couch their argument in terms of an assault on judicial legislating; the argument goes that Roe v. Wade is flawed because it rests on the judgement of nine unelected individuals rather than on legislation drafted by the elected representatives (either state or federal, senate or house, depending on who's speaking), and therefore we should overturn Roe v. Wade in favor of some piece of abortion-legalizing legislation to be introduced and hammered out sometime in the future.

This is a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

We have a working system right now that protects women whose health may be harmed by carrying a pregnancy to term or who have been impregnated by their rapists or through incest; we have a working system where a woman who wants or needs an abortion can get one without fear of infection. If you want to overturn the judicial decision that makes that system work because you think a legislated solution would be less fractious, then your duty is clear: get legislation guaranteeing a working system like what we have now passed BEFORE you go about overturning Roe v. Wade.

Barring that, stop pretending that your campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade has anything to do with preserving a woman's right to choose.