'Nuff said.
While I’ll admit that there is plenty to criticize in Coulter’s tweet, there’s pretty significant information in the column it links to. Unless someone who’s been following this case more closely than I have can come up with and post convincing information showing her to be full of beans, I’d say the defense lawyer’s claim that Georgia has “legally lynched an innocent man” tonight is as clearly wrong factually as it is in the Merriam-Webster sense.
For those not wanting to take the time to go back and follow the Twitter link, Coulter’s column on the subject can be found here:
You are 100% correct that his execution was legally done.
No doubt about that.
If you were an innocent* man on Death Row about to be legally executed I hope you’d take comfort from that.
- To be fair we do not “know” he is innocent but we do know there are substantial question marks around his being guilty.
I suspect that I’m also 100% correct that the media has been inventing doubt as to Davis’ innocence out of whole cloth. If there were indeed as many innocent men on death row as has posters here would have us believe, I should think the media’s efforts would be better spent publicizing the plight of those innocent victims rather than someone who’s so clearly guilty.
And what does it say of the media in that it has been relentlessly foisting such inaccurate and biased information upon us in order to persuade the innocent and ignorant among us to its political point of view?
Media bias, folks. It’s here and it’s real. The media will happily shade its reportage and/or outright lie to you in order to influence your thinking. The Wiki article on propaganda defines it thusly:
If what the media has been doing in this case is exactly that. If anyone has a more accurate word to describe the media’s behavior in this regard I’d very much like to hear it.
Media bias?
William Sessions, a former federal district judge in Texas and FBI director under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, had this to say:
Does he seem like a squishy liberal to you?
And yet U.S. District Judge William Moore, a jurist much more familiar with the trial than Mr. Sessions appears to have been (cite) , called alleged new evidence of Davis’ innocence to be “largely smoke and mirrors”, an assessment I would tend to agree with wholeheartedly considering Davis’ own attorney’s refusal to allow the two most important recanting witnesses to testify at the post-trial evidentiary hearing, even though, as Coulter says, one of them was seated outside the courtroom ready to appear.
ETA: It is worth noting also that William Sessions made some of the same spurious claims that have been making the rounds in the media, which shows clearly the insidious effect of the media’s having propagandized this issue in the way they have.
And we all thought the US couldn’t lose its tenuous grip on moral superiority any more. Congratulations, murderers!
Cripes, I will never understand how a society that calls itself civilised can call the ‘death penalty’ legal.
No, not really. For those who don’t want to click the link, Coulter tweeted the following:
With a link to a column she wrote about how those awful liberals were trying to spare the life of a cop killer, who is just like a baby seal, because they’re both cute and cuddly and covered with sexay white fur, and you just know it’s a dodge when liberals get all sad panda about dead baby seals, because no one believes they’re really innocent. As if! Baby seals are the number one cause of death for cops age 65 and older. Which is why liberals are stupid for claiming that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent because everyone knows baby seals can’t do hard time.
No, actually she wrote a column illustrating how the media has distorted the facts and made this case into something it isn’t close to being in truth.
The media is supposed to protect us and keep the government honest, but who’s to protect us and keep the media honest?
No one, apparently.
It’s kind of sad to see a fifty-something woman writing like her fourteenth birthday is tomorrow.
The facts, people, the facts! Doesn’t anybody care about the facts?
Add Bob Barr to the list of other staunch conservatives who think this was a wrong execution:
But everyone knows Bob Barr is really black, so he’s biased.
Judge William Moore conducted the hearing in which Troy Davis was allowed to present his evidence of his innocence. The judge then issued a 172 page ruling going over that evidence. It can be found at these links: Part I and Part II.
No, the completely moronic baby seal metaphor was all her. So was the crass dancing on a dead man’s grave. So were the repeated swipes at “liberals”. So was the gratuitous swipe about anthropogenic global warming. Pretending that Coulter was writing a serious contemplation of the role of the Media in the execution of Troy Davis is ignoring all the random bullshit that Coulter herself drug into her column.
Aside from that, she wrong on the facts of the case.
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She claims the bullet fragments from the shootings match each other. They might match each other, but the ballistics expert wasn’t sure. At any rate, no gun was ever recovered or proved to belong to Davis, so the evidence proves nothing about whether Davis had the gun which shot anybody. cite
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She makes a big deal about “the media” saying that seven of nine witnesses recanted and blows this off pointing out that there were actually 34 witnesses. Elsewhere, she makes a vague reference to the Times and the New York Times as the source of her ire.
In truth, here’s a Time article which states clearly that it’s the defense team - not the Times writers themselves - who is arguing that seven of nine key witnesses have recanted. One can certainly quibble about the word “key” in that sentance, but even disallowing it, it’s a far cry from saying that Time is making that argument, as Coulter implies.
- Coulter claims that Davis and/or his lawyers refused to call the two most importat of the recanting witnesses at his hearing this summer. Coulter suggests that Davis knew the witnesses wouldn’t hold up. But that’s not what actually happened. Coulter seems to be confusing the fact that the Judge didn’t allow Davis’ team to call witnesses who claim that his accomplice, Coles, had killed the policeman, because Coles wasn’t subpoenaed properly (and didn’t volunteer to testify himself.) Cite
We may need someone to Watch the Watchdogs - but it won’t be Ann Coulter who saves us.
FTR - I have no idea if he’s guilty or not. I’m opposed to the death penalty in all cases on moral and philosophical grounds.
But for your suspicions to be false – for media bias not to be spinning the plausibility of innocence out of whole cloth – it isn’t necessary for Sessions to be correct; it is only necessary for him to be (1) an apparent authority (2) making prima facie reasonable claims. If he’s culpably wrong, it’s not the media’s fault per se.
You just don’t have enough evidence to claim any “insidious” media bias. Believing that requires an unfortunate leap of faith.
If you read the link that Whack-a-Mole posted to Sessions’ opinion piece, you’ll see an almost verbatim recital of arguments and beliefs about the case that coincide with the accounts I read yesterday in most of the mainstream news articles about Davis’ upcoming execution and the circumstances surrounding it. Reading his piece, particularly in light of Judge Moore’s findings and the information in Ann Coulter’s column, has left me with little doubt that he knows very little about the case besides that which he may have gleaned from mainstream media sources. He’s just too wrong about too many things for there to be any other explanation.
No offense, but Wikipedia is not a good place to cite this kind of information, especially in a case like this. Just sayin’. He can’t cite Anne Coulter as reliable, you really shouldn’t cite Wikipedia in an instance like this.
I want to drop my goo on Ann’s adam’s apple. She’s hot.
Unless you can provide evidence that she is lying or has a history of lying or is simply wrong, then I most certainly can.
Quit trolling.
(Bolded parts added by me for comprehension)