His example does serve as a decisive rebuttal to claims that legal restrictions on government should be relaxed in response to extraordinary threats. The answer to “Well, shouldn’t the CIA be allowed to torture somebody to find a ticking nuke?” is “If it’s that important, do it… and then go to prison for it.” (which is pretty much Liddy’s self-justification for his actions).
No - but it means he has not earned the right to be treated with anything other than unmitigated contempt.
True. But nobody’s glad to see criminals released who’d commit the same crime again if they had the opportunity.
You’ve got to do it anyway, because you can’t keep people locked up indefinitely because they have a bad attitude (unless you’re the Bush Administration, of course), but the fact that they’re out there still isn’t a comforting thought.
In Liddy’s case, the only redeeming thing is that he almost certainly won’t be in the position to commit such crimes again.
You’ve obviously never seen his work in 18 Wheels of Justice.
Well, the DNC is now way across town, and the Howard Johnson’s is now a dorm for George Washington University. So yeah, these positions won’t work ever again.
It does make it hard to claim that he’s redeemed himself, though.
Which is why I said he is only partially redeemed. I had just this in mind.
I’m not trying to split hairs here, but I clearly stated he wasn’t a hero and was a criminal. Clearly, too, he’s hardly the worst criminal we’ve produced. Ask random people on the street, and I think most would agree with this.
I think you are on very safe ground here, Moto.
But so what? Does everyone have to be judged on a scale that includes Jeffrey Dahmer and Stalin and Pol Pot?
He’s someone who should be denied any position of public trust and should be considered morally repugnant. It doesn’t matter whether he’s “worse” than anyone else or not. It’s enough to conclude that he’s bad enough as to be denied the social credit of an upstanding member of society.
Maybe it’s just me, but admitting that you did wrong is the absolute minimum you need to to receive any kind of redemption. If someone can’t do that much, then they haven’t redeemed themselves at all. Appearing on Fear Factor doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid.
If you take a quick look at history, you’ll find a lot of lousy people standing up for what they believe in and not taking shit from anyone. Which suggests they might not be such greats thing by themselves.
You know who didn’t take any shit? Hitler!
Mostly because of his life-long problems with constipation, but still…
I was this close to saying that - he didn’t take any shit from the art school that turned him down 
- but I figured an argument that starts with G. Gordon Liddy doesn’t need to go Godwin.
Liddy is an assclown. I read his book, went to one of his live lectures, and heard his radio show several times. He’s mendacious, I expect. The right-wing zealot sociopath crazy asshole act plays well to his core audience…which I suspect has an awful lot of overlap with Ted Nugent’s. IRL, I know he did some illegal things, but I believe he pumps it all up considerably to keep his fans enthralled with his manly style of doing things.
Thing is, though, our society requires only that criminals do their time - and Liddy did his.
Also, I will note that he did do that lecture tour with Timothy Leary. Now, Leary spent some time in prison himself, and I don’t think he had many regrets either. Should he be regarded as unredeemed?
How about those guys who never regretted their decision to dodge the draft and head off to Canada? Are they unredeemed?
I will freely admit that the scale of the crimes are different - but you aren’t arguing that - you are arguing about remorse and redemption. Seems to me you’d leave lots of folks unforgiven if you insisted on an act of contrition on their part.
All I said was that Liddy had partially redeemed himself since the 1970s. Such redemption doesn’t make him a hero, it doesn’t make him a nice guy, it doesn’t make him any less guilty. That being said, the country is a more interesting place with him in it, and I’d say the same for Timothy Leary as well, if we still had him around.
Wrong. Our legal system requires only that criminals do their time. That means we can’t continue to apply criminal sanctions against him. But criminal law is not the sole legitimate standard for judging individuals in our society. On a non-legal level, we are perfectly free to consider him an unredeemed criminal constitutional-violating dirtbag.
These are all value judgments. Liddy has no remorse about using his position as a government official to violate the constitutional rights of private citizens and engage in criminal activity. Leary had (I’m guessing) no remorse about experimenting with illegal hallucinogens. It’s perfectly valid to judge these two failures of remorse differently.
What exactly does “redeem” mean to you? Bud Krogh and John Dean were implicated in crimes closely related to those that Liddy served time for. I’d ask you to compare redemption as exhibited by Krogh and Dean and show me how Liddy has redeemed himself in any moral sense.
Legal and moral redemption have been conflated a few times in this thead. You only need redemption if you do something wrong in the first place. If you think Liddy did something wrong and Leary and the draft-dodgers didn’t, only Liddy’s lack of remorse is an issue.
And again, I think you’re all making a criticism of the man out to be a defense.
If I condemn him, but fail to condemn him quite so strongly as others in this thread, it is still a condemnation. And I’ll just leave it at that.
What are you talking about? What “position as a government official” did Liddy use to violate the constitutional rights of private citizens?? For that matter, what “position as a government official” did Liddy use to engage in criminal activity?
I thought Will was hilarious. I really liked the prison stories, especially the one where he learned martial arts from a kung fu master whose hands had been molded into weapons. “You are the first white man I have ever taught.”