And a great deal of harm before. Plenty of people do good charity work. Colson and his associates are fairly unique in the amount of damage they did to American’s faith in their governing institutions.
Are we lower then people that use buglers and thugs to undermine the Democratic process?
I’m not celebrating his death or anything, but I can understand why people are pissed. Watergate and the other misdeeds of the Nixon administration were a big deal, enough so that even 40 years later people are justifiably angry. Pointing at the fact that one of the perpetrators did some nice charity work later in life and expecting that to make people forgive him is silly.
Comes close to being repentant? I don’t agree. I think repentance for a crime involves acknowledging that you committed it, acknowledging it was wrong and trying to make amends. Just doing good works in some unrelated facet of your life might be nice for other reasons, but I don’t think it signifies repentance.
Instead Colson’s most vocal statements on Watergate after his trial appear to be outrage at the guy that ratted him out.
(also “turned his life around” to me suggests not doing what he did before. Which is certainly true in this case, but kind of a silly defence, its not like he was going to have an opportunity to participate in another major gov’t conspiracy, and I imagine Ellsburg’s psychiatrist has invested in some better alarm systems).
Some people are more imperfect then others.
(Aside: I hate when people argue against “the board”. There’s no such beast.)
He’s famous for his involvement in Nixon’s smear campaigns and Watergate, so that’s what people are discussing on the occasion of his death.
Look at your defense of the man. It’s one-sixth building him up (however anemically you can—and who can blame you, there ain’t that much to say in his defense) and five-sixths arrant pissing on anyone caught in the crossfire.
Not really. As I said in the other thread, he was an unscrupulous Republican operative who just went from one set of scummy tactics to another. He was still working in an underhanded, manipulative fashion to promote Republicanism. He didn’t change any more than a serial killer who has switched from a knife to a gun has really changed.
They pretty much are the same thing. The Republicans have always essentially looked at AIDS as a biological weapon to kill gays and Africans; something to be encouraged, not stopped.
Repentance is meaningless unless the penitent indemnifies themselves. If done after they’ve been caught, it’s just a simple way to restitute their own image. Which is why I find the dichotomy between unrepentant and repentant criminals to be trite, especially when used as a defence of capital punishment. The mens rea when committing the crime would be exactly the same and I’d actually have far more respect for a gradual transformation than an immediate acknowledgement of culpability: if anything, it shows that they knew how despicable their actions were before committing the crime.
This guy has about fuck all on Gregg York or Sidney Gottlieb though.
I didn’t refer to repentance in a religious sense. Just someone acknowledging their bad acts and trying to lead a better life. There’s a concentration on apology by some that doesn’t impress me. Apologies are easy (or should be), but demonstration of changed ways is more difficult. I’ve heard Colson denounce his own actions and the philosophy behind it, so I give him some credit for that.
Since when are words or thoughts more important that actions? I mean, what would you prefer - a man who says he’s sorry and feels bad about himself, or a man who does neither of these things, but instead acts to make the world a better place?
From some of the posts in this thread one would think that Hitler had just popped his clogs. For fuck’s sake, as bad men go this one was about as evil as Mary Poppins. Expend such vituperation on people like this and where do you go for expletives when someone really nasty dies? Turn it down a notch, why dontcha? We’ll still get the point.
Indeed, and this is the attitude Colson explictly embraced: that endlessly rehashing Watergate and going around saying “sorry” all the time would be seen as empty words, and that his job was to show he was sorry through his actions.
I’m not a huge fan of everything he’s done post-Watergate but Prison Fellowship has done a hell of a lot of good for a hell of a lot of people – most of whom are the kind of people that most of us don’t give a damn about.
In the second half of his life, Colson did an awful lot of really good things; how that balances with some of the shitty things he did in the first half, God only knows. I do feel pretty confident that, all things considered, he was a better man than me.