Closing Arguments: Schaddenfreude, Reality TV, and No JUSTICE for Caylee Anthony

It's FINALLY over!  Both sides have been heard, the jury has decided, and Casey Anthony is a FREE woman forced into hiding to work out her demons, sort through offers, and plan the rest of her life which is once more her OWN.  But is she really FREE?  Can she go out for a cappuccino at Starbucks?  Can she shop for a new dress at the local mall?  Can she go into a public hair salon and get her hair styled?  In theory, she can, but in REALITY she would be risking her LIFE.  There is a very real and palatable HATRED of this woman the seeing her in public would likely generate and "Ox Bow Incident" mentality and end with her either being torn limb from limb, or at the very LEAST, lynched or beaten to death.   Sadly it was that way LONG before the jury made it's ruling, which is why this woman has spent most of her pre-trial incarceration in ISOLATION.  It was feared by the Sheriff's department (and RIGHTLY so) that she would not have survived in general population, especially since most of the women incarcerated with her were themselves MOTHERS or just women who had already concluded, like MOST of America, that she was  a child murderer long before the first piece of REAL evidence had been introduced.

Why do so many people HATE Casey Anthony?  It's only natural to want a guilty person to pay for his or her crime, but do we HATE everyone that's accused of murder in this country?  I hope not because there are so many, we wouldn't have time for anything else, nor would likely live very long as HATRED is a very self destructive thing to carry around.  It's physically, physiologically, and psychologically harmful to its host. Hatred is also highly irrational, esp when it's directed against a veritable STRANGER.  It is usually NOT organic in nature, but a result of external stimuli.  Germans didn't HATE Jews instinctively.  They were PROGRAMMED to do so by propaganda from the Nazis.  Anti-semitism results in PREJUDICE, bot not HATRED on it's own.  To get to HATRED, you need provocation and that usually comes from  media saturation.

That's what  has been driving this ENTIRE case.  Absent the media saturation, no one would know the names Caylee or Casey Anthony outside of the people who knew them on a personal basis before they achieved "realty TV star" stature and notoriety.  Had either Caylee or Casey not been so physically attractive, the story would have remained a blip in the local Orlando news and been long since forgotten.  So it's the MEDIA that jammed this story down our throats from day one.  It;s media pundits and commentators that have driven this story, and in a fashion reminiscent of Jean Paul Marat's "Friend of the People" tabloid newspaper, ginned up the lynch mob mentality that sent thousands to the guillotine in an orgy of blood lust during the french revolution.   Marat and Nancy Grace know how to gin up a lynch mob.  Who can forget  the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, or the total FICTION that was CALLED a rape case?  When emotion drives the bus, the logical and rational "rules of the road" go right out the window, and that is EXACTLY what happened in this case.  But where did the emotion come from and why did it get so intense?

At the heart of everything is a cherubic little two year old toddler named Caylee Marie Anthony.  Who  Gould see that little girl's pictures or videos and not just MELT?  You would have to be INHUMAN to not feel sadness at the thought of that little girl being taken from her family by person or persons unknown; and lest we forget, that is how  this case started.  When her picture first popped up the cable news program as a missing person, my first thought was that she had been abducted by a child  sex trafficker and, even after media pundits and legal analysts starting baying for her mother's blood, I maintained that the EVIDENCE supported that conclusion far more convincingly than it supported the premise that Caylee had been murdered, let alone that her own MOTHER was responsible for it.  It was far more likely that Caylee had been abducted using a long can paradigm that had led THOUSANDS of young women into white slavery, the disappearing modelling agency.  If your target was a CHILD however, the modelling agency wouldn't work, as a mother would tend to REMAIN with her child during the photo sessions.  Far more likely would be a NANNY or daycare scenario, as a mother would be more likely to leave a child there for a prolonged period of time, usually to go to work.

Whenever I argued or defended  this theory, I was ridiculed and attacked by people who had already made up their minds that Caylee was dead and Casey had killed her.  I was called a  dreamer, of thinking like a LAWYER (a pejorative in MY vocabulary) or of being interested in Casey or attracted to her, etc by people who ordinarily were liberal in their thinking and therefore open to possibilities outside the obvious, or at least imbued with the perception of having OPEN minds.  Not in this case, however.  With the EXCEPTION of a few lawyers who practiced criminal or defense law, nearly everyone I talked to regarding this case had concluded the worst and condemned Casey Anthony before there was even the slightest evidence that Caylee was anything but a missing person.  

How then did a local missing persons case get to be a national media event with the appeal of a network produced reality television show?  The simple answer is that it was turned into one by the 24-7 news media and non stop barrage of legal and media pundits and commentators that first created, then FED the addition to all things ANTHONY, much like the average heroin pusher will first create the dependence and then provide the supply of his TOXIC product.  The "reality" in modern America is that it's sometimes difficult, if not IMPOSSIBLE do discern the difference between real life and reality TV.  Some people used to believe anything they saw on TV.  However, since the advent of "reality TV" it's soemtimes hard to tell what's "real" and what's "contrived" to LOOK real.  Just as shows like "Survior" and "Jersey Shore" create "stars" of people who are talentless and mediocre at BEST, so too does a non stop media spotlight create another kind of "star" when it overdoses the public on a criminal defendant (ESPECIALLY and attractive one) like Scott Peterson (who to this DAY still gets love letters and marriage proposals even though he's been CONVICTED or murdering his wife and unborn child) and Casey Anthony, who's now free to PROFIT from being free to sell HER story to a publisher, go on media interviews for pay, and may even end up on a reality TV show, or the cover of HUSTLER.  She, too has recived money from her legions of horny males fans, and  a few marriage proposals as well.  That would NOT happen if she were netiher HOT< nor prospectively looking at getting RICH.  

Some of the hatred directed at Casey Anthony comes from the standard green eyed monster, JEALOUSY.  Women are jealous of her because she's young, attractive, soon to be RICH, and will have her pick of men, including (in thir irrational minds and their husband's wildest fantasies) THEIR husbands.  If you could treat the average couple on a couch watching Casey Anthony on the news like a comic strip and put a though bubble over their heads, you would see something like "She's HOT. I wouldn't kick HER out of bed for eating crackers) over the MAN'S head, and probably something like "BITCH.  I wanna scratch her eyes out" over the WOMAN'S head.  To be fair to the women, some of the hatred comes from the fact that these women are themselves MOTHERS and have natural maternal instincts when it comes to the welfare of children.  Like Sarah Palin and her "mama Grizzlies" implies, women WILL protect their children and attack anyone who tries to harm them.  The protective instinct is not limited to their OWN children, either.  However, these dame women, more likely than not, know EXACTLY what the man next to them is REALLY yhinking as he stares at Casey Anthony, so they HATE her for THAT.

The other explanation for both the popularity of the Anthony case, and the anger over the verdict is the psychological phenomenon of "schaddenfreude."  The term comes from the two german words meaning "damage" and "joy" and more simply put, it means that one takes pleasure in the suffering of another, esp another who ordinarily would have it much better than the person enjohing their suffering.  In one of my favorite episodes of the series "Boston Legal", Betty White uttered the line that describes it best.  She said "It's FUN to see PRETTY people fall."  She was referring to Heather Locker's character being on trial for murdering her older and richer husband.  That line has a missing subtext, however.  It should read: "It's FUN f (for UGLY people) to see PRETTY people fall."  It can also apply to the scenario in which it would be fun for POOR people to see RICHER people suffer.  That mentalilty gas us Madame DeFarge and the French Revolution!  But the conflict between the pretty people and the less than pretty people can be found everywhere as well.  Think of the passions aroused against Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton when THEY were facing jail.  It's the exact same thing with Casey Anthony.

If you look at the "angry mobs" outside the Orange County Courthouse and jail, you don't see many lookers in that crowd.  That may have something to do with the fact that a face contorted in anger is rarely an attractive one, but even putting THAT aside, most of the people baying Casey's blood are much more like the "hound" than the "fox."  This is not to say that everyone protesting outside the courthouse is only mad befcause they're jealous of Casey being young, HOT< and likely to make major bank, there are also MOTHERS and FATHERS out there as well as looks have nothing to do with THEIR anger and frustration at what they perceive is a system that failed to deliver JUSTICE for Caylee Marie Anthony and nay do the same for THEIR child some day,  Regardless of the driver, it's the EMOTION that's in charge of these people.

Any average person has to believe that Casey Anthony had something to do with what happened to Caylee Anthony.  She was the last person seen with her, she had motive, means, and opportunity, and there was a LOT of circumstantial evidence that could lead one to conclude she's involved.  But it's a far crown from being INVOLVED, to being a cold blooded murderer who actred with malice and deliberation.  Those are LEGAL standards, but such circumnstantial cases have sent many men and women to death rows who were later proved INNOCENT by advances in forensic technology such as DNA.  There was none of that here, but the ABSENCE of it ahs to give one pause and create doubt, and by legal standard, that "doubt" MUST innure to the benefit of the Defendant, like her or not.  Do I believe Casey is blameless in this case, not on your life.  But suspecting is a lot different form having it proven to the legal standard.  Like Johnny Cochran once said, "If the gove don't FIT, you MUST acquit."  In a jury trial, only TWELVE opinions matter, and OURS are NOT among them.

Looking at the facts presented from a DISPASSIONATE prospective, which iis what JURORS have to do, There is no way to overcome the presumption of innocence beyond a "reasonable" doubt  Courts exist to apply to LAW, and the legal standard for convinction is that the state must prove the DEFENDANT committed the crime charged "beyond a REASONABLE doubt."  The sticking point in many people's craws is that word "reasonable" which makes since, since it's a SUBJECTIVE standard.   To Adolph Hit;er. Josef Stalin, and Bill Ayers, GENOCIDE was "reasonable."  To a liberal, NOTHING is reasonable because they are driven purely by EMOTION which negates logic and reason,.  Either way, the only way to conclude the Casey Anthony wilfully MURDERED her child based on the evidence presented would be to let anger and hatred overrule logic and reason: and, fortunately for all FUTURE criminal defendants (of which ant of US can be one some day) that did NOT happen here.  LAW is the result of the thoughts and actions of MEN, and as such it is NOT prefect.  JUSTICE is the purvue of "god" or a "higher power" and is best left to him (or HER);

As for Casey Anthony, what SHE deserves at this time is to relegated back to ANONYMITY.  She should be devoutly IGNORED.  Do NOT buy her books, do NOT watch her on television or listen to any interview, close your wallets to anything Anthony, and justice will prevail because the only woman can PROFIT by her act or omission is iw WE buy anything form her.  If WE stand firm and turn her off, tune her out, and shut her down, she will be punished far greater by Universal Justice than anything the State of Florida could have done to her.  She's now a media junkie.  She CRAVES attention, positive OR negative, and she has to have it.  She's an attention junkie, and the best thing we can do is cut her off cold turkey.  Let her return to a life of anonymity and a the only career for which she's qualified, the STRIPPER POLE.  That  outcome would FINALLY deliver JUSTICE, even if it IS only POETIC,  for Caylee Anthony.

Was Our Economy Murdered? A Grand Jury Case for Indictment On a PREMEDITATED MURDER Charge!

The following article is being presented as if it were a criminal case being presented to a Grand Jury to secure and indictment against the defendants believed by the police and prosecuting attorney to have committed that crime.  When a crime is suspected or has occurred, most citizens react by calling this police. Police work and crime detection are as much about luck and hunches as they are about actual physical evidence and the proverbial “smoking gun.”  It is no wonder they sometimes get it wrong.  That said, I firmly believe that MOST police officers and honest well-intentioned public protectors, but like any other human group, you got good ones, and corrupt ones.  This is exactly why it takes more than a cop hunch to put someone in prison or to death.  That’s what jury trials are for. But before you can get to a jury trial, a charge has to be filed with the court.  That charge can be based on a prosecutor’s affidavit or an indictment by a Grand Jury which means that a panel of ordinary citizens has concluded that a crime was committed, and that the accused defendant probably committed it.  It is that proceeding that I’m going to replicate today.  I will be the prosecutor, and you Dear readers will be my Grand Jury.


My burden will be to prove that our economy was, in fact, the victim of a crime and that>the crime charged is attempted murder.  It is only attempted murder at this time because our economy is not dead, contrary to liberal media opinion.  It has been grievously injured and could possibly die, but as of now it’s very much alive if not well.  Most states define attempted murder as the commission of an act with the unlawful intent to deprive the victim of his life.  It would also be desirable for the accused to have failed in that attempt so that the does not get increased to murder in either the first or second degree.  


My subsequent burden will be to show that the person or persons against whom this indictment is sought had to motive, opportunity, and criminal intent to commit the crime charged, and to present evidence to show that they, in fact, did commit the crime charged.  In assessing culpability, the grand jury *you, the readers) are not required to find guilt or innocence, only probable cause that the crime was committed and that the accused could have committed it.  


Could the economy have been Murdered, or was the economic decline just a result ofnatural market forces?  There are compelling arguments to be made for both sides, but one of the more compelling arguments supporting foul play is the overwhelming benefit to one of the accused from the economic tsunami.  The ONLY beneficiary in all of this is the Democratic Party.  No private enterprise, private citizen, or public entity other than theDemocratic Party and its candidates benefit from this economic malaise.  But the Democrats are not the only ones accused here.                      


To understand why both Republicans and Democrats stand accused, you have to first understand how the economy was injured.  We can all agree the tsunami, for lack of a better term, occurred in mid September of 2008, but that wasn’t the first potentially fatal blow.  The first potentially fatal blow to this economy occurred shortly after the election of the Democrats to majority in the House and Senate.  They passed a law that reinstated the mark-to-market accounting rule that had been removed ironically by the Roosevelt administration to help bring about recovery from the Great Depression.  This was done in response to the Enron collapse, but it had the unintended (or intended) consequence of setting up the financial sector of are economy for fiscal Armageddon.


The longest occurring and most lingering assault on the economy has been a verbal one by Democratic politicians and their allies in the media.  Democrats or their surrogates and sympathizers have been trying to talk down the economy since before the 2006 midterm elections.  They first tried a frontal assault on the economy, telling us that the economy was not good.  This flew in the face of record high indices, free-flowing credit, and all appearances to the contrary so it failed.  Not to be discouraged, the Democrats resorted to a classic from their play book, class warfare.  They changed the premise from a bad economy to an unfair one in which only the rich were benefitting.  Even this failed and the Democrats were left with no other strategy than to lie to the voting public and promise that if they were put in power they would end the war in Iraq.


This was disingenuous at best, and an outright LIE at worst.  Any one who was taken a high school civics course knows that only the President of the United States to order our armed forces to engage in or withdraw from combat.  The Democrats knew, and hoped the voting public didn’t, that the most they could do with withdraw funding from the Defense Department which would essentially leave our troops naked in the field.  No clear thinking politician would dare attach his or her name to such a bill.  Only the most committed ideologues would even consider such a thing, and then only because they knew it wouldn’t pass.  This makes the promise they made to the voting public a false one, and true to form, they failed which infuriated the far left but not the majority of Democratic voters.


To make matters worse for the Democrats, our troops (aided by the surge of new forces) started winning in Iraq despite the best efforts of the Democrats to convince us otherwise that the war was, in fact, lost.  No matter how they proclaimed the statistics were wrong, and that General David Petraeus was a liar (i.e., the “suspension of disbelief” comment by then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) the facts spoke for themselves.  Casualties were down, elections were held, Iraqi troops were taking the field and taking control, and all evidence showed we were winning the war.  The Democrats knew they would not be able to win in 2008 on that issue.  They had lost credibility promising to end the war, and now that we were winning it, the war rage vote would not be enough. 


Enter once more, the economy.  It was still at record highs and the Democrats knew that unless something changed dramatically, they might not be able to take the White House or keep their control of Congress.  Shortly after January of 2007, Democratic supporters on the blogs began a “whisper” campaign about the economy.  This time instead of a frontal assault, the bloggers started reporting that the economy was not sound.  It was not “real.”  Words like “illusion,” “smoke and mirrors,” “house of cards,” etc. started appearing in the texts and it wasn’t long before these sentiments started finding their way into the mainstream media coverage of economic news.  


Not surprising, as the rumors grew and spread, the stock market traders reacted by short-selling financial stocks, driving their prices and perceived values downward.  Not long after this started, credit rating agencies like Moodys and Standard & Poores announced that they were lowering the credit rating of investment banks like Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman-Sachs, and any other bank that traded in mortgage security instruments backed by sub-prime and conventional loans.  The decision of the rating agencies was made across the board and did not take into account the fact that most of the mortgage loans were paying.


Once the credit ratings were lowered, the investment banks found themselves in the unenviable position of going from having balanced books with cash reserves to being insolvent overnight.  They did the only thing they could do, which was to scramble to sell assets to raise capital.  Under the newly reenacted mark-to-market rules, however, the value of the assets had so fallen that it was impossible to raise capital in a timely manner.  For Bear-Stearns, this meant a shotgun wedding with our government holding the shotgun, but for Lehman Brothers, there was no relief and it was forced into bankruptcy.


The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was the second domino to fall, and set off a chain reaction that is still going on Wall Street.  Had the government known of the events to follow, it would likely have reversed its decision not to save Lehman Brothers but, as in all things, hindsight is 20-20.  The identity of the person that made the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail is not known, but it is certain he or she was an employee or officer in the previous administration.  As to what happened after Lehman Brothers, we have only to look at our 401K statements and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to answer that.




The final question to answer is the why of it all.  To answer that, you simply have to look for the answer to one question: who benefitted?  Who is the sole beneficiary to all of this economic chaos and misery?  The only beneficiary I can find is the Democratic Party and its political operatives and supporters such as the media.  AT the time of the economic collapse in September of 2008, John McCain was ahead in the polls, and the Republican’s “Joe the Plumber” anti-socialism message was beginning to resonate.  Add to that the resurrection of the Reverend Wright ads and controversy and Obama was flailing and losing ground.  Then, the economy collapsed and this single event followed by the serio-comic response of John McCain and the government as a whole in passing the Trouble Asset Recovery Program, put the Republicans on the mat never to return.


Had it not been for the economic meltdown, John McCain might well have won the presidency and even if he did not, it is relatively certain that the Democrats would not likely be enjoying their hold on absolute power in Congress right now.  Now, I’m not saying that the politicians in the Democratic Party intentionally visited this much misery on the country merely to win an election.   Politicians, whatever their ideology, go into public service to help people and I’m not yet jaded enough to say otherwise.  You may think me a Pollyanna for this belief, but until the evidence to the contrary is more than anecdotal, I remain a true believer. This nobility is reserved solely for elected politicians.  However, for every politician you see on stage, there’s an unseen force of a few to thousands of nameless, faceless political operatives and supporters you do not see, and these people will stop at nothing short of criminal behavior to get their candidate elected.  It seems that, given the
evidence of this last election cycle, that we can no longer exclude criminal behavior, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle.  After all, it was democratic supporters like ACORN and the preppie college students in Ohio that committed countless cases of voter registration and outright voter fraud, and it was democrats that refused to install any credit card security software on their sites resulting in numerous allegations of credit card fraud.   


The last item I wish to present is that the Democratic Party is the only party whose membership consists of a core of ideologues that believe no one is entitled to private wealth and that such wealth should be confiscated by the government and redistributed evenly to all citizens regardless of whether they had anything to do with its’ creation in the first place.  This constituency would think nothing of wiping out the wealth and retirement savings of millions of American because they do not believe anyone is entitled to private wealth in the first place and that the temporary misery is justified by the liberal utopia they hope to create.  It’s like my parents used to tell me as they were spanking me with a paddle, “its for your own good and you’ll thank me for it someday.” 


So in conclusion ladies and gentlemen of the Grand Jury, I submit that I have established more than enough evidence to conclude that our free market economy was and IS the victim of the crime of attempted murder and that said crime is ongoing to this day.  Now that Obama and the Democrats are the doctors charged with saving this economy, they continue the assault against it every time they open their mouths.  It is almost as if, rather than employing heroic measures such as CPR, defibrillation, administering medicines like epinephrine, etc, they are putting a pillow over the face of the economy to hasten demise.  Fortunately, they are just as much a failure at that as they have been about everything else thus far because our economy is not dead.




This concludes my presentation to you, the members of my grand jury, and I now charge you to return a True Bill of Indictment for the crime of attempted murder against the following defendants: The United States Governments for the years 2006 to the present, including former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and its political operatives and supporters from the last election cycle, including the main stream media coalition, and last but not least, the greedy and unscrupulous wall street traders that orchestrated the demolition and devaluation of the financial stocks by short selling and other strategies designed to force stock prices down for their own personal enrichment regardless of the consequences to others.  This case is respectfully submitted for your consideration.  Thank you for your attention.