Let’s Think about Something Pleasant Instead

This:

And this:

We can just admit those are the same song, now, right?

Christ Almighty, I Almost Prefer the Victim-Blaming Version

Remember when the New York Times ran their story on that poor girl being gang-raped in Texas and it was all “Where was her mother? What was she wearing?!”

They’ve done a follow-up story. It’s a better story in that it’s not victim-blamey, but holy shit, it will rip your heart right out for this girl. Her dad is sick and can’t work. Her mom has a mass in her head she can’t afford to get removed. The girl went from being a bubbly, happy honor student to the victim of multiple rapes over many months. Yeah, it’s like this group of guys figured out that her home life had taken a turn for the worse (with her mom being extremely depressed about her medical condition) and that they could swoop in and exploit her vulnerability.

This whole paragraph from the victim-blamy story?

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

Turns out that her “friends” she’d been visiting for months were the adult and almost-adult men who had been raping her for those months. Those neighbors saw that her dress and behavior had changed and that she was hanging out with adult or almost adult male “friends” and they didn’t bother to see that as a sign she was in trouble, but as a sign she was Slutty McSlutterson. You wonder what kind of boys and men could decide to go on a months’ long rape and molestation spree of an eleven year old girl, calling their friends to come get in on it, without even a hint of remorse. And then you learn that their friends and neighbors saw them with that girl and got all judgmental about how she was dressed and behaving.

Months.

They raped her for months.

And the people in their neighborhood saw her with them and saw something was obviously wrong with her and said nothing, did nothing, turned their backs on her suffering.

Well, you know, sometimes you hear about shit like this and you wonder “How could this happen?” But, honestly, thanks to that shitty first article from the New York Times, at least in this case we know–it happened because these shitty fucks come from shitty fucks.

I Don’t Ask This Lightly: What the Fuck is Wrong with Bill Ketron?

When you’ve let whatever your pet cause is–illegal immigration, in this case–blind you to the fact that you’ve set out on a course to terrorize children, you need to take a step back.

What kind of sadistic fuck wakes up in the morning and is like “Golly, what can I do today that will cause little children to be afraid to go to school?”

And to ask the schools to become immigration investigators so that you can feed your sadism? It’s honestly disgusting.

And the concocting of lists of children who don’t have the right paperwork? I love how anybody left of Nixon in this state is called a commie or a socialist and Bill Ketron wants Tennessee’s children to live like this is fucking Soviet Russia, everyone needing their papers at all times. Is being a commie a bad thing or not? Or is being called a commie terrible but writing state laws to make the state more like Soviet Russia is fine? Sincerely, what the fuck?

Here’s what I hope for Bill Ketron. I hope he gets what he gives. Like some kind of retributive twist on the Golden Rule–I hope his whole life is filled with others treating him the way he treats everyone else.

Because a man who would make little kids afraid to go to school deserves some bad, bad karma.

The Daily Beast Covers the Henry Granju Case

You can read the whole thing, but I’d like to draw your attention to this:

John Gill, special counsel for the Knox County District Attorney’s Office, wrote in an email to The Daily Beast: “It has been somewhat frustrating that the media has seemed to accept everything from a grieving mother without law-enforcement experience as an accurate assessment of the law… My office and the Knox Co. Sheriff’s Department has conducted an exhaustive investigation and have pursued all possible outcomes under the facts and the law. At some point all the info about the case will be public record.”

Now, you’d think John Gill would, oh, you know, read Katie Granju’s blog about all her failed efforts to discuss the case with the lead investigator on the case before he said something like “the Knox Co. Sheriff’s Department has conducted an exhaustive investigation,” since one would think that an exhaustive investigation would include talking to the victim’s family. Or maybe Gill thought the lead investigator would same something vaguely similar to what Gill had said.

But here’s what happened instead:

In seeking comment for this story, The Daily Beast reached the lead investigator by phone and asked if he’d ever met Katie Granju. He responded, “No, I have not.” When asked to confirm that he’d never met Henry, he promptly hung up.

Listen, I think Betty Bean is absolutely right–that they want to treat these overdoses like discrete cases, almost like accidental suicides. And I’m not unsympathetic to that position (which I know makes me kind of a heartless asshole). But any person living in Knox County or sending their kid to UT Knoxville should think long and hard about this portion I’ve highlighted.

Something terrible happened to Katie’s son. Some of it he did to himself. But he didn’t beat himself up and he didn’t manufacture his own drugs. Crimes were committed against him. And you, too, could be a victim of a crime in Knoxville. God forbid it be a crime that leaves you incapacitated or dead, but it could happen.

Are we, as a community, actually comfortable with the definition of “an exhaustive investigation” being one in which no one attempts to interview the victim? No one talks to the family about what the victim may have told them in the last days of his life?

That scares the shit out of me.

If that’s exhaustive, I’d hate to see what their half-assed investigations look like.