Posted on 06/11/2019 4:04:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
The sadistic treatment of Paul Manafort illustrates something I have believed since I attended graduate school in the 1970s and saw the behavior of left-wing students: Leftism makes people meaner.
There are kind and mean conservatives and kind and mean liberals. Neither liberalism nor conservatism makes people kinder or meaner. But this is not the case with leftism. With the handful of exceptions that accompany every generalization, leftism makes people meaner, even crueler.
Take the transfer of Manafort, the one-time Trump campaign manager, from a federal prison to New York's Rikers Island prison. Rikers Island is universally regarded as a wretched place. As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote:
"The decision to move Paul Manafort ... from the decent federal prison to which he was sentenced to solitary confinement to the dangerous hell hole that is New York City's Rikers Island seems abusive and possibly illegal.
"I know Rikers well having spent time there visiting numerous defendants accused of murder and other violent crimes. It is a terrible place that no one should ever be sent to."
Mass murderers and torturers are among those incarcerated at Rikers Island.
Moreover, Manafort, found guilty solely for white-collar crimes, will be placed in solitary confinement -- "for his own safety."
Virtually everyone who has written about solitary confinement, both on the right and the left, deems it torture. Manafort will therefore be tortured after being sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for fraud and, in the words of the Daily Wire, "a little-known law that requires lobbyists to report that they are working on behalf of a foreign government (in Manafort's case, Ukraine)."
Angry over the possibility that Manafort may be pardoned by President Trump, the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, charged Manafort with additional crimes based on state law. That way, if found guilty of state offenses, he cannot be pardoned by Trump, as the president's power to pardon applies only to federal -- not state -- crimes.
Everyone knows this prosecution is politically motivated. Vance hates the president and wants to use solitary confinement in a hellhole with violent criminals to squeeze Manafort into testifying against the president.
As Dershowitz said to me on my radio show, what Vance is doing reminds him of Stalin and Beria -- the infamous state prosecutor, a man Stalin referred to as "my Himmler." Dershowitz, a lifelong liberal Democrat and supporter of Hillary Clinton, does not use Stalin analogies loosely.
To her credit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: "A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That's what solitary confinement is. Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary."
I might add that my opposition to Manafort's treatment is not partisan or new. On a number of occasions over the years, I have cited favorably New York Review of Books articles describing the horror of solitary confinement.
Despite its history of opposition to solitary confinement, The New York Times article reporting the plan to relocate Manafort said nothing against the unnecessary transfer but did comment on the expensive suits Manafort used to wear.
Solitary confinement is "basically a deathtrap," former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik wrote when Manafort was placed in solitary at his federal prison. Manafort should never have been sentenced to solitary confinement. But Robert Mueller (and Judge Amy Berman Jackson) sought it for the same political reason Vance has: to break the man.
As former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell wrote: "When a witness or defendant from whom prosecutors want 'cooperation' does not do as they demand, they put him in solitary confinement. And it works. It literally breaks people.
"Solitary does have a place in our prison system, but only for those people who are simply too dangerous to be placed around others at all. However, the torture of solitary confinement should never be used as it is now to break people to prosecutors' will -- to torture them until they will say or do anything to get out.
"Solitary is also called the 'hole.' It's a small space, barely large enough to stand, with a slit for light, to which prisoners are confined/caged for 23 hours a day. ...
"Paul Manafort, seventy years old, has endured this torture for eight months. He's now in a wheelchair, while Judge Amy Berman Jackson mocks his rapidly deteriorating health. Where is the outcry from the ACLU?"
So, then, what enables Vance, Mueller and Jackson to engage in such evil?
The only answer is their politics -- the politics of the Trump-hating left. Cyrus Vance, Robert Mueller and Amy Berman Jackson may well be good parents, loving spouses, loyal friends and charitable individuals. But leftism has given them permission to act vilely and mercilessly while thinking of themselves as fine people -- just as evil doctrines have done throughout history.
As noted at the beginning of this column, when I was at Columbia, I witnessed this leftist mean-spiritedness firsthand in the personal cruelty of left-wing agitators against professors and others with whom they differed.
Here's a question perhaps millions of parents will be able to answer: If your child returned home from college a leftist, was he or she a kinder or meaner person than before he or she left for college?
The question is rhetorical.
Of course leftism makes people meaner. How else can leftists shrug off the tens of millions murdered and the many more millions tortured by leftist regimes?
With the handful of exceptions that accompany every generalization, leftism makes people meaner, even crueler. …I really hate when Prager does this uncited claim stuff. What about abolishing family, private property, religion and borders actually makes people less mean and less cruel?? I don’t expect an answer, of course.
ALL DEMOCRATS are VILE, EVIL, VICIOUS, LYING DESTROYERS of good people!
My view: Evil people become leftists.
This the crying contradiction that emanates from a set that would ostensibly not harm a fly.
It’s sin, obviously. It is exaggerated caring for some arbitrary group A at the expense of some arbitrary group B, both chosen by the whim of man. In this case Manafort is the goat. A justice system that we used to be able to trust to try to do the right thing has now become a tiger’s paw for politics.
If there is any consolation to Manafort, it is that God Himself understands Manafort as a martyr, and that if Manafort keeps his behavior excellent in the wretched place, it will be a witness that rebukes evil.
given their torture of him for so little,
and given THEIR treason/sedition,
then they should hang.
Or some distorted kind of rightists (both are possible; whichever dominates by number depends on the circumstances of the age).
I suppose if I got forced into such a spot, I would work on continual praying while writing a book.
I can’t completely agree, I’ve gotten pretty mean towards the left too.
Soulless people become leftists. Leftists ideology worships power above all else with those at the top exercising the power of life and death over others. Leftism is a form of self deification.
One of the devil’s big temptations is to try to oust him by acting like hell ourselves.
Meanness is a substitute for reason and fairness. Winning is everything with this people.
Winning is great; the kicker here is in whose name we win.
On the other hand, Leftists say Christians are mean for saying homosexual marriage or abortion is wrong. If morality is relative, anyone can be demonized. Leftists think they have a license to judge others and hold grudges, which only makes them bitter people because most often they don’t get the retribution they want. When they do get it, they go into the same mentality when soldiers break a seige, venting all their pent up frustrations into a single bout of aggressive vengeance.
The difference is we regrettably realize what their intransigence requires of us. They are such retards they fail to realize our patience is the only thing between them and “their just reward” and our patience is wearing very thin. No society can survive without real Justice. Of course it’s just my opinion, but I don’t think Barr ever intends to pursue the coup conspirators, for whatever his reasons are (I suspect he thinks his highest priority is to “preserve the dignity” of the DOJ, he has said he sees his mission as restoring it’s “integrity”). He must think he can balance the society’s requirement for real Justice and the preservation of the DOJ. Personally, I don’t think there is a “sweet spot” that he can find where his desires and the country’s survival can be balanced. It simply doesn’t exist. Barr is going to HAVE TO demonstrate for everybody that real Justice has been done or let the country die the resulting death.
That is my view too.
People don't get nasty, mean and evil by becoming democRATS.
To even become a democRAT and believe what they believe, one has to be a mean, nasty evil person to begin with. Becoming a democRAT just makes them worse.
Being mentally ill also is a requirement.
So now imagine mean, nasty, evil AND crazy people running the country.
Is evilness a mental illness?
I disagree. My hypotheses is that leftism doesn't make people meaner it simply appeals to and attracts the sadistic bullying a$$holes from the population. You know the type - those who think they know better than anyone else and are determined to force their ideas on everybody.
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