Courtland Milloy Is an Idiot. A Big One.

Thought I already wrote this piece

March of the idiots continues. Or rather march of the deliberately misleading pundits propounding a false moral relativism continues. First it was Deion Sanders who wondered aloud why we were wasting time with the Michael Vick federal dogfighting case when Darrant (sic) Williams' killer is still on the loose.*

Now it's Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy with a piece called 'Animal Cruelty Isn't Judged on a Level Playing Field.' Can you smell the bait? See Courtland

primarily deals with issues that affect the lives of African Americans.

Judged = justice, playing field = athletics, dominated at the highest levels by blacks despite resentment from small minds. Put it all together in a bowl and you're soaking in a broth of racially-motivated persecution prosecution driven by establishment resentment of a wealthy back athlete. It's poo-poo Courtland and you know it. Allow me:

Courtland talking about steak

Too bad for Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick that people like me love dogs more than cows. Or, to put it another way, I prefer the taste of Angus and Hereford to Rottweiler and pit bull. Otherwise, the federal agents who recently charged Vick with dogfighting would have to arrest nearly all of us for participating in far worse acts of animal cruelty.

The very definition of the 'scale/scope' slight of hand. Why worry about dogs WHEN THE POOR COWS ARE DYING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There's also something in there about slaughterhouses.

In the first place Courtland, we can be at least reasonably certain the animals raised for food in this country, or for import into this country as food have been treated to a minimum standard for care and killing. There is even a whole field of veterinary medicine for food animals, professionals trained to know whether an animal is in good care or in unsatisfactory conditions.

The last thing a cow may feel is the captive bolt upside the head before he is quartered but never was he starved, beaten, fed gunpowder or forced into a ring to fight a fellow cow. If your aim is to make meat eaters accomplices to Michael Vick's disgusting acts of barbarism we ain't buying.

Continuing, next graf:

...most of us are carnivores. We'll kill a duck, deer, turkey -- name any meat -- for the sheer entertainment of our palates or for the fun of the hunt.

And yet, Vick, 27, must take the fall.

Whoa that was so much bullshit I'm having a hard time prioritizing. Duck, deer, turkey, nutria, let us separate the entertainment of our palate from the nonegotiable human need for protein. Meat, tissue, is a source of protein. While media elites such as you and I no doubt enjoy a good meal from time to time in which we sample the braised this or the pan-fried that, the vast majority of meals consumed in this country are not for entertainment value.

Much of America, including your inner city DC constituency, shops for and buys what is in their budget and it is more difficult to maintain a healthy diet cost effectively without meat. It can be done to be sure as I did for five years, but the market for food in this country dictates that the lowest cost way to get a balanced diet is inclusive of meat.

As for entertainment killing, what am I, Ted Nugent? Last year the Washington Monthly reported that only 18 percent of Americans hunt or fish. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was even grimmer this year, reporting in July that only 5 percent of Americans consider themselves hunters. Somewhere between one in five Americans and one in 20 Americans enjoys the fun of the hunt, which like the food-animal business is tightly regulated, you don't just get to go out with an 8-gauge and start shooting. I question whether this is a large enough minority to merit mention.

And that Michael must 'take the fall' for our culinary indulgences and for the minority that pursues hunting legally, this is the very definition of specious.

We now move to the next step down the ladder of false moral relativism, the 'where do we draw the line:'

It's just that all the hullabaloo about dogfighting seems a bit hypocritical.

For the most part, we revel in a culture of blood sports in which people and animals are pitted against each another. The knockout in boxing, the knockdown in football, the crashes at Daytona and Indianapolis -- those are the draw. Without the video images of tigers ripping the hides from zebras, cobras fighting mongooses and other bloody contests played out in the wild kingdom, the Discovery and National Geographic channels might as well go off the air.

Ok first blood sport go look at the Wikipedia entry for 'blood sport.' All competition is not blood sport and football soccer and NASCAR do not fit this definition despite some blood being shed occasionally. By your estimation watching my five year old boys tangle is a blood sport, which come to think of it actually is.

Niiiiice. Nice transition from car crashes to wild animals. To be sure my cruelty alarm goes off when I see an obviously staged scene of animals attacking and dying, or obviously drugged prey shambling listlessly before the predator and those programs with such low production values should be ashamed of themselves if not prosecuted.

That said an enounter between a lion and a wildebeest is nature in action and in nature neither the lion nor the wildebeest need by tortured or beaten into playing his part as are dogs that get into the ring and sniff each other's butts instead of fight. I'll bet you'd have Marlin Perkins arrested if he were not already dead.

And how the hell do you think they get those kittens to eat that food so intently in the commercial. Answer: by starving them. You forgot to mention this one.

It starts to unravel at the end. There is talk about race horses and then:

Barbaro's leg could not be fixed, so he was eventually euthanized. For many broken-down racehorses, that can mean anything from lethal injection to having their throats slit -- killed just as surely as a wounded dog that can no longer fight.

When a horse's leg is broken in such a way that it cannot easily be set or fixed, the horse either will continue to injure itself by trying to get up (horses live on their feet), causing infection and eventually gangrene and death after great suffering or will starve on its side if it is literally unable to move. Either the lethal injection or the throat slit is more humane than simply letting nature take its course on a horse in this condition.

Next:

Vick's farm was raided by agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the same USDA that permits the wholesale slaughter of cows, chickens, pigs and lambs.

See above, it's that same USDA that regulates the wholesale slaughter of animals. You cannot simply buy an axe and a block of wood and go into the food packing business. These are mutually exclusive aspects of the USDA's mission and you are venturing into speciousland again.

Next:

Vick's case ought to be handled by a state's attorney, but it isn't. He is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. You'd think the guy had been caught smuggling a ton of heroin in the carcasses of dead poodles. U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson is presiding. His previous experience includes hearing cases that involve people suspected of being al-Qaeda sympathizers or "enemy combatants."

The state's attorney was not up to the case, he let the original search warrant expire, and we now know that there were things on that property that were used for illegal means. Michael still may be charged in Virginia. Michael's business apparently crossed state lines and the feds have jurisdiction over that. As for the al Qaeda reference in the article about the rich black athlete going to prison, whoa, that's as close as you can get to saying judge is a racist.

Finally:

Perpetrators of gun violence ought to be taken so seriously.

According to data recently released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, nearly half of more than 10,000 guns recovered by law enforcement authorities in the Washington area came from Virginia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people -- human beings, not dogs -- have been killed by these guns. But you won't find any gun manufacturers -- or even many killers, for that matter -- being hauled into court on conspiracy charges.

Apparently you have to be a dogfight promoter for that.

Another scale/scope diversion, the one that goes THERE ARE SOM ANY GUSN COMING OUT OF VIRGINIA WHY DO WE CARE ABOUTY ANYTHINEG ELSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

And as a matter of fact Courtland the Republican-controlled Congress passed a law in 2005 that indemnified gun makers from lawsuits that were busy trying to haul gun maker ass into court to take responsibility for flooding the market with guns. President Bush signed it and as recently as 2006 that law was cited by a DC Superior Court judge in throwing out a case that sought to hold gun makers responsible for the unending flow of guns into the District. Know your history and your law, your problem here is not with overzealous prosecutors looking to put down a black man, it was Republicans in thrall to the gun lobby making a politically expedient decision at the expense of the very citizens about which you write.

You should be ashamed. What Michael Vick has now admitted to doing is barbaric in its own right and no amount of lame distraction will make anyone believe he is the oppressed.



* For the record, his name was Darrent not Darrant, it is disrespectful of the dead to misspell their name in the course of a specious argument.

Courtland Milloy from here.