Loyalty vs. Justice (and Law and Order)

A joke making the rounds on Twitter concerns Bill Cosby trending, and people wondering which cabinet position Trump nominated him for.

Some of his nominations, particularly of Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, are at least equally ridiculous in terms of the qualifications a serious person would require for such posts.

But Donald Trump is not a serious person. He is a wannabe mob boss, and the primary qualification for underlings in that field of endeavor is loyalty to him above all else.

This explains both his worst cabinet nominations and his blanket pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists, who ranged from unwitting trespassers (who could reasonably be pardoned) to real criminals (who should have served their terms):

Image by the January 6th Committee, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

There seems to be a fairly big misconception that only peaceful J6 protesters got pardons while violent felons got commutations. That's not true.

Among those who received full, unconditional pardons: Peter Stager, who beat a cop with a flagpole; Daniel Rodriguez who drove a stun gun into a cop's neck; and Peter Schwartz, who attacked police with a chair & chemical spray.

The text of the pardon reads in part that it serves to end "a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years."

Whatever one makes of those events, unleashing real criminals is no way to achieve justice.

Absent real justice, the poetic variety has already come for one of these criminals, a repeatedly-convicted man who would still be alive today if not for Trump's actions and his own lawlessness:

An Indiana man recently pardoned by President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol has been shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop.

Just after 4 p.m. on Sunday, a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy pulled over 42-year-old Matthew Huttle of Hobart, Indiana State Police said in news release.

While trying to arrest Huttle, police say he resisted and began struggling with the deputy.

"An altercation took place between the suspect and the officer, which resulted in the officer firing his weapon and fatally wounding the suspect," police said.

Meanwhile, another of these outstanding citizens, Daniel Ball, is in jail for federal gun charge, and yet another is wanted for soliciting a minor online.

A major motivation for many Trump voters was law and order. This reckless mass release is a poor start, to say the least.

-- CAV