College scholarships...for murderers

Just when you think you have seen and heard it all, you find yet another example of the moral inversion that is destroying our culture.

Bruce Reilly, a first-year at Tulane [University’s School of Law in New Orleans] ... had pled guilty to second-degree murder and robbery and served 12 years in prison. When he was 20 years old, Reilly beat and stabbed to death a 58-year old English professor at Community College of Rhode island, capping off his crime by stealing the professor’s car, wallet, and credit cards. In short, he is a felon....

The fact that Reilly is an admitted student in Tulane’s law school should be at least curious and potentially worrisome to the students, alumni and supporters of that school. The Louisiana Bar, like all other states, requires proof of good moral character and fitness to be admitted to the bar, a requirement that almost always excludes felons – particularly those who have been convicted of a violent crime as heinous as Reilly’s. (The fact that he is out of prison after only 12 years when he murdered and robbed an older college professor doesn’t say a lot for Rhode Island’s criminal justice system, either.) It is next to impossible for him to become a licensed attorney even if he graduates, as Tulane University officials must surely know.

As at least one student complained to The Times-Picayune, Reilly is taking up “another’s space in the law school even though he may never be able to practice as a lawyer because of his conviction.” But it gets worse.

Reilly is attending Tulane on an NAACP scholarship and a Dean’s Merit Scholarship. The NAACP has made it very clear in its public statements and its litigation that it believes that the constitutional right of states under the Fourteenth Amendment to take away the right of felons to vote is “discriminatory” and “undermines the most fundamental aspect of American citizenship” (which the NAACP apparently thinks means being able to murder and vote at the same time).

As the hero said in my thriller HUNTER, correcting Edmund Burke:

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is an enabler."

White House sniper: just another "minor offender"

ABC News about Oscar Ramiro Ortega, being hunted for sniping at the White House: "Ortega has an extensive record, ranging from domestic violence to drug charges." And: "U.S. Park police say Ortega may have spent time blending in with Occupy D.C. protesters."

Yeah, he'd clearly fit right in with that crowd.

The Examiner: "Ortega's criminal history in Idaho, Texas and Utah includes arrests for assault of a law enforcement officer, marijuana possession and being a minor in possession of alcohol." Yet, despite this criminal history, and even though he was picked up for questioning by cops hours before this sniping incident, they let him go.

There you have it: just another "minor offender" being "treated" with "alternatives to incarceration" so that he could be "managed outside an institutional setting." Your criminal justice system at work, folks.

News stories that make me write vigilante thrillers

Get a load of this news story. Then come back here and read the rest of this post.

Got that?

Now, please: Never, ever say that in my thriller HUNTER I exaggerated or misrepresented the appalling level and number of moral inversions that occur daily within our alleged "criminal justice system."

Combine this case with the systematic "enabling" that allowed a child-molesting predator to continue committing atrocities against little boys for years at Penn State University, even after his rapes had been eye-witnessed at least twice, and we see a society that has completely lost its moral bearings.

The cause? A single premise: that individuals are not responsible for what they do -- that they are helpless "victims" of circumstances beyond their control.

From Freud to Rawls to the pulpits to the classrooms, a vast Excuse-Making Industry of intellectuals has persuaded millions that criminals are mere "victims" of circumstance; that the only real crime, therefore, is punishing them for actions that they "couldn't help" -- or even daring to pronounce a negative moral judgment about them, or anything; and that the primary purpose of government is not to protect people from predators, but to redistribute the "lucky" fruits of some people's success to those who were too "unlucky" to get their "fair share," from whatever mysterious source that goods and services and happiness are supposed to magically materialize.

The unrelenting, ubiquitous war on the principle of personal self-responsibility has led to widespread moral intimidation and cultural paralysis, even in the face of brazen degeneracy. Consider just a few recent examples:

* the unwillingness of politicians to clear city streets and parks of "Occupy Wall Street" vandals, thieves, rapists, thugs, and bums, no matter what crimes they openly commit, while police are ordered to stand in passive witness of their offenses;

* the mute confusion and anguished indecision of at least two eyewitnesses and countless college bureaucrats to the Penn State predator's rapes of terrified, helpless little boys;

* the linked news article in this post, which documents once again how our misnamed "justice system" simply can't recycle career predators back onto the streets fast enough or often enough.

If your knee-jerk response to this angry post is indignation over my words, rather than over the unspeakable atrocities that provoke them, then you've imbibed the same toxic premise that is killing our civilization: the premise that the only real "evils" are anyone's demands for self-responsibility, and any moral judgments that proceed from that insistence.

And as you look around our nation and the world at the rise of savage mob rule, tribal piracy on the open seas, and terrorist thuggery everywhere, you need find the cause of it all at no greater distance than your route to the nearest mirror.