The “soft on crime” zombie issue reanimates
By digby
…. with some modern twists:
Scott Lemieux makes a couple of important points today about the latest Hillary Clinton pseudo-scandal bubbling up from the toxic fringe. Yes, wingnuts are now fashioning themselves as latter day feminists, defending the rights of women against that horrible Hillary Clinton, the misogynist. (I have previously argued that the right was going to use the left’s concerns with rape culture and other feminist issues to blow back on Clinton, but I assumed it would by regurgitating Bill’s past not Hill’s. Of course, that could still be on the menu. It’s early days.)
Anyway, Lemieux discusses this emerging right wing tactic of condemning any lawyer who ever defended a bad person:
[N]ote the slavering authoritarianism underlying Continetti’s line of attack. When a someone guilty of a terrible offense gets off lightly because the state botches the evidence, we’re supposed to blame…the defense attorney? What’s worse is that this prosecutors-are-never-accountable-for-anything attitude extends all the way to the Supreme Court, and to cases where prosecutors are not merely incompetent but actively malignant. Nor is the principle at stake mere empty formalism. Throwing people in prison, whether or not the state makes its case, because the state just knows they’re guilty and the accused doesn’t have access to a decent defense is really not a good way of proceeding.
There are plenty of people who subscribe to this idea, even good Democrats who defend Guantanamo or feminists who reflexively dismiss the presumption of innocence when a woman is a victim, for instance. But it’s the right that has made a profit at it with attacks on the pointy headed liberals who are “soft on crime.” Indeed, take a look at the recently revealed memos from Rahm Emmanuel in which he advised Bill Clinton to demagogue the “war on crime” for political purposes. (Clinton, incedentally, enthusiastically signed off …) It’s a perennial political attack from the authoritarian right which Clinton sought to “take off the table” by being a tough talking crime fighter but with some “new ideas.” Crime did fall down the list of big issues of concerns but as with some other issues that benefited from serendipitous timing (a tech boom during your tenure, for instance, making it possible to create a government surplus)crime has gone down for reasons having nothing to do with federal crime policy, thus benefiting the Democratic Party from its lack of salience.
This new tactic of attacking lawyers for having defended guilty clients in the past may be a sign that the wingnuts think this old issue has some life left in it. It’s classic “law and order” authoritarianism, mostly deployed in service of dog-whistling racism but perhaps we’re seeing a new twist: claiming the women victims as their own in the War on Women. (If they can throw in a little Willie Horton magic dust on that, I’m sure they’ll not hesitate.)
Lemieux gets to the underlying problem and illustrates how many liberals have sort of set the table for this kind of attack:
Second, this is an excellent illustration of why defending the death penalty or other excessive sentences by citing the preferences of the victim (or the loved ones of the victim) in a particular case is a poor idea. I don’t blame the victim whose attacker got off lightly for being upset with everyone involved, including Clinton. But when we assign responsibility we need to be more detached than a victim can be.
This desire to allow the victims to have revenge is a natural human impulse and it is present on all sides of the ideological spectrum. But it enables irrationality in a system that depends upon rules and procedures and dispassionate reason in order to achieve any semblance of justice. We’ve seen the laudable “victim’s rights” movement evolve into something that stands in the way of reason and it’s inevitably going to benefit the authoritarian mindset.
.