Here is the one post we will spend on this stupid, disgusting, fool of a man.
1.) I don’t know exactly what he did, but it certainly seems like prosecutors are overcharging him for shits and giggles. Ten felony counts for barging into a hotel room seems (armed robbery for stealing a baseball cap?), well excessive. If you want to look at the problems with our criminal justice system, I would start there. The media is dutifully reporting that this sort of charging is “standard practice,” and that is confirmed by my personal experiences working in a probation office years ago.
2.) OJ Simpson, along with being a double murderer, is the stupidest son-of-a-bitch to ever walk the earth.
3.) It infuriates me that thousands of man hours are going to be spent investigating this jackass, when he should be in jail in California.
4.) There is NO chance he will ever be tried in front of an impartial jury. Ever.
5.) The media coverage is already awful. Right-wingers like to whinge that the liberals want another Viet nam, allow me to whinge that the media seems to want another OJ Trial. The stupid bastard gave them one.
There. No more talk about OJ.
Mr. Moderate
It’s sort of like Al Capone. They couldn’t get him on murder or racketeering so they got him on what they could–tax evasion. OJ basically admitted to killing them, both in the book he just wrote and to his newly ex-girlfriend. If that’s what it takes to get him behind bars, then so be it. It’s not like they are going to give him ten years for a speeding ticket. They are giving him what the law allows. I wonder if this jury too will think that there is too much evidence to convict him.
BIRDZILLA
Will the liberal left-wing news media make big time hay over this as the usialy do?
PK
I don’t mind if he gets 10 yrs for stealing glasses and a basebell cap! He can get another 10 for just existing!
fecapult
Who?
ThymeZone
Nothing I can add to you post, pretty well covers it.
Punchy
Good. Can we discuss Sunny D instead? The Yellow Manna From Heaven is the drink of champions.
UnkyT
I don’t think what was stolen is the important part. If a gun is involved then he should go to jail for a long time.
Jake
Thank you John.
I’ve been wishing we could impose a NO-J policy in my office. I’ve already been cornered by a co-worker who is under the delusion that I: a) Give a fuck. b) Think OJ is the victim of injustice.
Zifnab
Well, there’s a lot of talk about this being a setup. Some guy has some of OJ’s stuff, which he was hiding from the Goldman family so they couldn’t seize more of his assets, and decides not to give it back. Or OJ tries to pawn it, and the guy doesn’t give him his money. Or something.
I mean, it’s freak’n Vegas. I don’t think anyone is really “innocent” in this affair. OJ is just a little more guilty because he’s a celebrity murderer. I won’t be sorry seeing him get his ass hauled off to jail. It’s just pathetic that the justice system has to get him on 1 count of being stupid and 3 counts of being famous, rather than 2 counts of premeditated murder like they were supposed to originally.
Fe E
I don’t want to gloat, but at my office I haven’t heard even one word about OJ.
:whistles and tries to slink away:
cmoreNC
While he’d make “honorable mention” on most people’s lists, he has so much competition for any ranked list of “stupidest sons of bitches” [among people having any widespread prominence or notoriety], that he’d be hard-pressed to make #1 or even #10. Take Mike Tyson, for instance, or Brittany Spears, or….
Second, if I had to bet substantial money on it, with the ironclad truth about whether he was in fact guilty of the murders was written on a piece of paper inside a box to be opened once all bets were down, I would not hesitate to put my money on a “guilty” bet to double murder. BUT: it is also true that the prosecution and police did such a miserable job proving the case against him in court that I don’t think the jury was incorrect in finding him “not guilty” according to the necessary “beyond reasonable doubts” requirements of criminal law. This is true even though he did have benefit of a demographically more favorable jury than most murder defendants have benefit of.
Years ago, I did practiced some criminal defense law, all of which involved considerably more humble-level schnooks than OJ. A local Assistant District Attorney whom I regularly worked with/against in cases and I came to the brilliant idea one day that a new class of offenses should be defined, which would more appropriately cover 90% of the people we dealt with than any of the existing statutes they were charged under.
– The Crime of being a Noxious Clown. If your noxious clownery truly endangered other people, it would be a felony, though not a major one. If OTOH your noxious clownery merely greatly annoyed, inconvenienced, or deprived other people of peace and sanity, it would be a misdemeanor.
OJ perfectly fits the crime of being a “Noxious Clown”.
Gus
Stupider than Douglas Feith? Stupider even than Dan Riehl?
Face
Fight the Power. Honkies.
akaoni
I predict that this will not be the last OJ post. John will at some point become so infuriated by the wall-to-wall OJ coverage that he will blow his top and post on OJ again. He won’t be able to help himself.
Jake
[reaches for baseball bat…]
VidaLoca
Yeah. I seem to remember a whole string of “last Imus posts”.
How long did that nightmare end up going on?
Mark S.
Can anyone explain to me why some of the counts are for kidnapping?
The big question is whether there were guns involved. Armed robbery would put OJ behind bars for a long time.
grumpy realist
Any popcorn to be dragged out over this would be very, very stale….
O.J. Simpson is the sort of jerk one wishes could just mysteriously vanish from the Earth.
Luckily I was living in Japan during the whole of the O.J. Simpson trial, so missed all of it.
farmgirl
Kidnapping is related to using a weapon to prevent the occupants from leaving the room, I think.
YellowJournalism
If it would make you feel better, you could just rent the Naked Gun movies and watch the parts where his character is shot, beaten, or dragged away by a bus. They always make me smile.
capelza
The only negative here is that I don’t like the idea of getting OJ (or anyone..actually anyone but OJ) for another crime, say a double homicide that he was aquitted of by proxy. That’s the feeling I get from this. It isn’t about him, cause I could give a shit, but the precedent of vendetta in the justice system. We couldn’t get him on that other charge, but we’ll make him pay for that one with this one (or 11).
The guy was aquitted because of crappy police work in LA. But I’m still pissed that even know this much about what happened in Vegas.
Meanwhile, I was over at Kos and apparantly the use of the word ‘Betrayus” showed up a few times in 2005 at Blackfive. I find that hilarious.
farmgirl
Even better, someone who served in the 101st under him in 2003 said it was current at the time … and probably followed Petraeus from unit to unit.
Dulcie
I live in Vegas, and I am stuck with double O.J. coverage – all O.J. all the time. I’ve tried not to watch any news at all, which is difficult for a confessed news junkie. Why the local news feels the need to augment the perfectly horrible national news coverage on this is beyond me.
Can we send O.J., Britney, and Phil Spector to Iraq or Gitmo? Please?
Gus
Dulcie, it’s not much better here. I can watch the local news, but “if it bleeds it leads” is their motto, so it’s not much better.
Tim F.
We would need a new scale to measure stupid due to its asymptotic behavior as one approaches zero. I would plot it on a log scale with Richard Feynman at the origin and Bob Owens defining the transition point to functional retardation. Points in between can be measured in milliOwenses.
John Cole
Links, please.
demimondian
Hmm. Has anyone ever seen OJ and Dan Riehl in the same room at the same time?
Tsulagi
Unchallenged at Blackfive…
Okay, now that’s just funny. Gee, Uncle Jimbo, why do you love the traitors in your own house?
Tsulagi
Here’s the link. For some reason it was screwing up the preview in my previous comment.
Krista
You know, combine the letters of “Simpson” and “Riehl”, you can make the following words:
“imprisons”, “phonies”, “slimier”, “losers”…
***You can also make “phimosis”, which amuses me to no end.
capelza
John Cole,
From Nov. 19, 2005
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2005/11/generals_of_yes.html
There are several comments that follow it that also use “General Betrayus”
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/05/update_funding_.html#comments
The original Kos post is here. Most likely you could find the term in other posts, too, but that place creeps me out and the Military Channel is on 24/7 at my house..it isn’t like I’m anti-military..just anti-crazy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/18/215826/698
There’s some more links to earlier uses of the term 9including the Times of London and others.
Can I ask you a favour John? A few years ago you e-mailed me the instructions on how to embed links..which i no longer have and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. Would you send or tell me how here? Thanks.
capelza
Er..Kos doesn’t creep me out (most of the time anyway, but rather Blackfive.
I see others have also supplied links, too.
Leader Desslok
Can we have another Cindy Sheehan post?
kirkaracha
O.J. got the same trial and verdict that any black man who was accused of killing a white ex-wife he’d previously abused and leaving a trail of her blood from his car into his house would’ve gotten.
Soliton
Here’s another link.
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007_01_07_balkin_archive.html
Incidentally, I offer the following sidenote about General Petraeus, by almost all accounts an enormously accomplished man: A student of mine at the UT Law School, who had had combat experience in both Afghanistan and Iraq, referred to him as “General Betrayus” because of what was thought to be his inordinate interest in good publicity (and presumed self-promotion) rather than concern for his troops. I have no idea whether this is fair, but I do know that this is what my sober and thoughtful student told me.
sab
The entire economic foundation of Las Vegas depends on tourists feeling reasonably safe in casino hotels. So no, you cannot go into a casino hotel room with your friends and a gun, even if you are retieving stuff you feel belongs to you.
Bob In Pacifica
On #2, I agree that OJ may be very stupid. It seems that the people around him have been setting him up over and over since 1994.
But I will ask Mr. Cole and anyone else who is so sure that Simpson killed those two people to provide the fact or facts you believe proves the murders were done by Simpson. When you do, did you ever bother to hear the defense’s response? What was it?
Although people seem to “know” and “believe” Simpson is guilty of the murders, they know nothing about the case. They may have watched the trial, but they conveniently turned it off or stopped listening when the defense presented its case.
Beyond that, an examination of the autopsy evidence shows that the victims did not die in any manner described by Marcia Clark. For example, there was no aspiration and there was no blood in Nicole Simpson’s mouth or sinuses. That is, when her throat was cut she was neither breathing nor bleeding. Likewise, Goldman was stabbed in his back after his was dead and a considerable amount of blood had drained from him.
People who commit double homicides in downtown LA when they’ve got a limo to catch within the half-hour don’t generally stand around the crime scene for ten minutes waiting for the victims to bleed out before making ornamental wounds to prove that this was a crime of passion.
I am continually amazed by how angry people are about OJ Simpson and how little they really know.