Always Late: Conservatives Finally Admit What Lefties Have Known for Decades
A video that’s appropriate in more ways than one: Always Late, played by a Wurlitzer
Ross Douthat takes a look at the US prison system and realizes something that lefties like myself have recognized and argued for years: incarcerating anyone possible for any piddling reason imaginable has been a disaster:
2.3 million Americans are behind bars. Our prison system tolerates gross abuses, including rape on a disgraceful scale. Poor communities are warped by the absence of so many fathers and brothers. And every American community is burdened by the expense of building and staffing enough prisons to keep up with our swelling convict population.
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Well, sort of: first Douthat makes a big deal that the “lock ‘em up solution works” (if that’s the case why do you propose doing away with it?), while at the same time making excuses for Mike Huckabee, who freed a rapist AND a murderer, both of who struck again.
Douthat also argues that conservatives must “take ownership of prison reform, and correct the system they helped build”, which is kind of like saying “Vote for John McCain: he got Iraq totally wrong, which is why he’s the best guy to get us out!” Even more laughably, Douthat calls the GOP the “law and order” party: Duke Cunningham anyone? Tom DeLay? Mark Foley? Rod Jetton? Blake Hall?
There’s a whole list at the Huffington Post.
But jokes aside, here’s the truth of the matter: lefties and liberals have been howling for DECADES about the problems spawned by creating a prison state (my friend Kate wrote a book about it), and the conservatives’ response has been to point the finger and shriek, Salem-witch-trial-style, “SOFT ON CRIME!! SOFT ON CRIME!!”
So yeah, it’s nice to see Ross and the right admitting what the rest of us knew all along. Maybe in another 50 years, they’ll admit that abortion is a necessary medical service, that health care is a right not a privilege, that it was stupid to invade Iraq, and that global warming is real.
But I won’t be keeping the lights on all night. Like the song says, “always late…”
