Picayune Extra: Signs Kyle Rittenhouse intends to fade away
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After Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted last November, many on the left feared he was going to become an omnipresent celebrity spokesman for the cause of vigilante justice, gun rights, and maybe even white nationalism.
It was a nauseating prospect. Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and wounded a third during street unrest in Kenosha in August 2020, and whether or not he was acting in self defense — and I believe the jury correctly found that he was — exploiting such tragic sequence of events would have been at best needlessly painful and divisive.
Early signs weren’t good. He sat for a fawning chat with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, gave an interview to BlazeTV in which he called the prosecutor in his case a “piece of shit,” and was given a standing ovation and hailed as “a hero to millions” during an appearance at AmericaFest, a Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix.
I get it. One side of the political divide was still calling him a white-supremacist murderer who set out to hunt human beings, while the other side was showering him with love and understanding. It’s easy to see why he rushed into the arms of those who wanted to embrace him.
Yet he emphatically told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he has no interest in politics and believes his story “should never have been used as a cause” for any political agenda. He expressed his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and said he wants to live a “quiet life,” studying nursing or, lately, the law in online college courses. He also suggested that he might grow a beard and lose weight to become less recognizable.
As long as he has that unforgettable name he’ll never achieve obscurity even if he craves it, and it remains possible that civil suits will result in trials that will put him and his story back into the spotlight.
But I took it as a good sign Friday that Rittenhouse’s attorneys and prosecutors reached an agreement to have the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratories destroy the AR-15 rifle he used that night. This was in line with Rittenhouse’s stated desire that the weapon not become a symbol or trophy.
Kenosha County has returned to Rittenhouse the clothing he was wearing when he was arrested. If that disappears forever as well, there’s a least a small chance that Rittenhouse will, too.
Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses
Phil K — "The other side is doing a hypocrisy" is truly the lowest form of discourse.
That is certainly something you would think if you didn't believe that having consistent principles is an important and admirable thing.
Laurence S. — I am a high school basketball referee, and, yes, most players are not wearing them properly. The real question is just how to enforce it. Many officials choose not to be the mask police. Think about it. We already get in enough hot water with usual calls on things like fouls, traveling, and other violations. How much more trouble do we wish to bring on ourselves? You seem to believe enforcement is simple. At what point do we call the technicals and have players removed from the game? If a player is dribbling down the floor and his/her mask slips down, should he/she adjust it while dribbling? Don't try to tell me a well fitted mask won't move. I can personally testify it just isn't true. Let me call fouls. Let coaches and school administrators worry about masks.
This should not be hard. We’re not talking about or worried about temporary slips. At breaks or lulls in the action (when I player is bringing the ball up the floor) you can whistle a play dead and direct a chinstrapper to adjust his mask. First offense an immediate return to the action. Second offense, the chinstrapper has to stay on the bench until the next time out. Third offense and beyond, a technical foul. Think how you might handle a violation of uniform rules.
Mind you, I’m not persuaded that masks are necessary for basketball — neither are college or pro overseers, clearly — and am of the mind that the rule should be scrapped. But having a rule that’s not enforced is the worst of both worlds.
Doug W. — Perhaps Peter Doocy’s question of President Joe Biden — ““Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?" would have been a stupid question if the Biden administration hadn’t been extolling the awesomeness of the economy while referencing that the evidence of that awesomeness was inflation. Also, I have forgotten the fairness of the media relative to President Trump over the preceding 6 years. And, how awful it must be for Peter Doocy to be considered stupid by the DC elite. (Especially, because they’re called the DC elite by the DC elite).
Was it a big deal? No. But it was a stupid question because it was merely heckling in the form of a question, an attempt to get a rise out of Biden rather than to gather information or insight. It was a stupid question because it had an utterly obvious answer, similar to a question such as “Do you think you’ll need to win the Electoral College vote to be re-elected?” Inflation is an obvious political liability. And it was a stupid question that would have passed basically unnoticed if Biden hadn’t called him out on it. And yes, reporters asked Trump barbed non-question questions to try to pull the string on his back and provoke some babble and bluster. And yes, Trump, who is at least as foul-mouthed at Biden scolded and hectored back. But no, we didn’t hear Fox News tsk tsking about it.
Timothy Noah mused on the “stupid question” question in The New Republic:
You can’t accuse Fox of not playing by the rules. It’s the rules themselves that are bad, and they have been for decades. They’ve rewarded political reporters, and especially TV reporters, for turning White House press availabilities and press conferences into opportunities to perform rather than inquire. … One reason is the vague wish that an annoying question will provoke a memorably peevish answer that will be news for a day before everybody forgets it.
Steve R. — I can't believe this question never occurred to me until this morning. Was Bingo the dog's name or was it the farmer's name?
Given that the direct antecedent for the pronoun “his” is “a dog,” it’s logical to assume that the dog’s name was Bingo. You bring up a sore spot for me because my family nixed the idea of naming our dog Bingo. I wanted to do this primarily so that people would ask, “Oh, like in the song?” And I would say, with a puzzled look on my face, “What song?” Then I would ask them to sing it for me and profess never to have heard it.
It would have been my little variation on the “Mr. Smoketoomuch” bit in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus:”
Mr. Smoketoomuch: My name is Smoketoomuch. Mr. Smoketoomuch.
Mr. Bounder: Well, you'd better cut down a bit then.
Mr. Smoketoomuch: What?
Mr. Bounder: You'd better cut down a bit then.
Mr. Smoketoomuch: Oh, I see! Cut down a bit for “smoke too much.”
Mr. Bounder: Yes. I’m afraid you must get people making jokes about your name all the time, eh?
Mr. Smoketoomuch: No, actually, it never struck me before.
Tom A.— President Biden continues to demonize those with whom he doesn’t agree at every opportunity; COVID-19 remains rampant, as does inflation; he embarrassed the country’s military with his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and then murdered ten innocent Afghans in “retaliation”; he can’t even rally his own party to advance his signature agenda; and he is likely to lose his party’s control of both houses of Congress in a little over nine months.
Whether you agree with the policies Biden champions or not, this is hardly the presidency the country was promised. Does anyone really think he’s doing a good job?
The question for me and most Democrats I know is whether the country is better off with Biden as president than it would be with Donald Trump in Oval Office. And to that question, the answer is a resounding, emphatic yes.
Trump allowed the pandemic to rage out of control while he first denied it was a thing and then said it would be over by Easter. Now his cult members are leading the anti-vax movement that’s prolonging the pandemic. So pardon me as I roll my eyes at your accusation that the Omicron surge is Biden’s fault.
I have yet to hear how Trump was going to handle the exit he promised and failed to deliver on from Afghanistan, so while the withdrawal under Biden had unfortunate outcomes I don’t know what to compare it to. And right now it boggles my mind to think of how Trump would be cozying up to Putin and tacitly encouraging the invasion of Ukraine.
The pandemic is likely to subside and inflation is likely to slow down but even still, yes, the political map and the polls don’t look favorable to the Democrats in the House and it’s hard to tell where the Senate will go.
Biden’s “control” over the Senate relies on attempting to harness rogue Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and he’s having the same problem with them that Trump had with Sen. John McCain, which is why we still have Obamacare, thank goodness.
Consider all the things Trump promised to do and failed when his party had control of the House and Senate. Great big beautiful wall, anyone? A health care plan? Infrastructure? Yet I’m sure you thought he was doing a good job, or at least better than you imagined Hillary Clinton would do.
In short, he’s doing a good job of not being Donald Trump. I hoped for more, sure, but it’s enough for me.
Ted B. —As bad as the situation with UIC Law professor Jason Kilborn sounds, I think the controversy over professor Greg Patton at the University of Southern California is worse. He came under fire for teaching students a Chinese word that merely sounds like the offending slur.
Yes, and then there's the University of MIchigan musical composition professor Bright Sheng who, as Reason reports,
… screened the 1965 version of Shakespeare's Othello in class as part of a lesson about how the play was adapted for the opera. This version stars Laurence Olivier, a white actor, who wore blackface to portray the protagonist Othello, a Moor. The choice was controversial even at the time, and today, the portrayal is considered by many to be akin to a racial caricature. It's not clear whether Sheng, who was born and raised in China, understood blackface's specifically American legacy, and why such a portrayal is considered offensive. But he swiftly apologized for screening this version of the film. "I thought (that) in most cases, the casting principle was based on the music quality of the singers," Sheng told The Michigan Daily. "Of course, time (sic) has changed, and I made a mistake in showing this film. It was insensitive of me, and I am very sorry." His apology ought to have been more than sufficient, but his students were not appeased.
Of course they weren’t appeased. Apologies don't work anymore. They are seen merely as admissions of wrongdoing and justification for further piling on. I’m starting to think that every college campus administration ought to have an Oh Come On! officer who mediates such ridiculous controversies and stiffens the spines of pusillanimous educrats.
As Kilborn pointed out in a lengthy interview with me Monday afternoon on WCPT-AM 820, giving credence to such histrionics discredits the important work being done by people who are battling actual racial injustice.
And lovely how the Michigan Daily (where I got my start in newspapers) quoted Sheng’s little grammatical slip.
Funny or…?
Speaking of British comedy, comedian Barry Cryer died last Tuesday at age 86, and of the following joke of his, he said, “I tell it to audiences sometimes and they're silent. But comedians love it.”
A man walks into a pub and the landlord is astonished. Half of the man's head is half of a huge orange.
“Sorry to be nosy," the landlord says, “but why is half of your head half of a huge orange?”
“Well, I was cleaning up the loft," the man says.”And I found an old lamp. I polished it up, and a genie came swooping out of it, saying, ‘May I grant you any three wishes, master?’
“So I said, ‘I'd like to have a million pounds, and every time I take the million pounds out of my pocket, another million appears there.’
“The genie said, ‘Your wish is granted. And your second wish?’
“‘I'd like a big house with 100 beautiful ladies in it.’
“‘Your wish is granted,’ said the genie. ‘And your third wish?’
“‘I'd like half my head to be half of a huge orange.’"
Norm MacDonald told a very similar surreal, absurd non-joke joke having to do with a pumpkin head.
All such jokes are really just variations of “Q. Why did the chicken cross the road? A. To get to the other side,” in which the surprise is the utterly ordinary, unsurprising punch line.
I believe the world is split among those who don’t get the “half of a huge orange” joke, who get it but don’t think it’s very funny, and those who think it’s brilliant. In comments, let me know which camp you’re in.
Ya’ gotta see these tweets!
I often run across tweets that are too visual in nature to include in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently.
@brettminor’s comment on this image was “You learn something every day.”
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The visual tweets were some of the funniest ever! I laughed out loud at each one! Thanks for sharing.
I'm at work and just burst out laughing at the half my head is half an orange joke! I'd explain my behavior to my co-workers, but they would be of the 'I don't get it' ilk.