Goin' Back to Neverland

Jesse Walker | June 15, 2005

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair stand up for the Michael Jackson jury.

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|6.15.05 @ 12:41PM|#

I don't generally agree with Mr. Cockburn's world view, but I think he's dead-on correct in this analysis. The taxpayers of Santa Barbara ought to be livid that they are paying such a bunch of incompetent boobs to be their county attorneys. Michael Jackson's activities with children certainly do raise suspicions, but ferchrissake, you need just a wee bit more than suspicion and a freaky defendant to bring charges.

And that stuff with "recovered memories" that have been used in other child-abuse cases--that shit's straight out of the Middle Ages. Always makes me think of the Monty Python "She's a witch" scene. Memories can be suppressed, but the methods used by a handful of experts trying to recover them in these cases was laughable even to a layman such as myself.

Of course, it wasn't laughable to many of the citizens of Walla Walla, WA, who were subject to a "recovered memory" witchhunt a few years back...and the prosecutors there bought that crap hook/line/sinker.

|6.15.05 @ 12:46PM|#

a lot of the time, what looks like the mind recovering memories is probably just the mind inventing new ones. http://www.skepdic.com/repress.html

|6.15.05 @ 12:49PM|#

. Always makes me think of the Monty Python "She's a witch" scene

Or that "Afternoon Delight" scene in Good Will Hunting.

|6.15.05 @ 1:45PM|#

When I find myself nodding and thinking "right on!" while reading Alexander Cockburn, I also experience a dizzying sense of disorienting unreality. But when he's right, he's right.

Geraldo also lacks a certain gravitas, but when he referred to those shrews at Court TV as "The Witches of Eastwick," he was spot on. Nancy Grace makes my flesh crawl -- interacting with the other witches by calling them "good friend," longing for their return to home base so they can do dinner...yuck. All that "just between us girlfriends" schtick with that bevy of lawyers and girl psychologists on that channel is insulting to female attorneys. (As Mesereau told Larry King, Court TV isn't professional.)We are not all at an Oprah-level of legal commentary.

|6.15.05 @ 5:32PM|#

I'm hoping Mr. Jackson will do what John and Patsy Ramsey did when pundits advanced the absurd and hurtful theory that their surviving son had murdered his sister--hire a topflight civil attorney and sue the stuffings out of them. And when might we expect the mother's indictment on welfare fraud charges??

|6.15.05 @ 11:27PM|#

Don't forget the horror show of the Fells Acre Day Care prosecutions in Massachusetts. The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz turned the light on that travesty, winning the 2001 Pulitzer for Commentary.

Kevin

|6.16.05 @ 2:57PM|#

You know, when I compare this trial to the one in To Kill a Mockingbird and remember how poorly that turned out for defendant Tom Robinson, I can only marvel at how far we've come.