Monday, October 06, 2008

The punishment fits

We're torn here, people. A large part of us wants to tear into comments made over the weekend by one of the VP candidates. Naturally, we're not talking about the guy who's taking time off from campaigning because of his mother-in-law's passing. We're talking about the woman who seems to think that quirk and being "cute" will help put her in office. After all, it was just this weekend that she decided that she wanted to link her opponents to terrorists, in spite of the fact that these links have been debunked time and time again, and also in spite of her own connections to radical groups that share a similar view.

But we won't. We're not going to step there, other than that opening paragraph. Why? Because this is America, and it's an America that we would like to believe will not vote based on scare tactics or on who winks at us the most. We'd like to think that this is an America that will vote the way they do because, well, otherwise we're Germany.

Not like Nazi Germany. No, we're talking about the Germany that sentences an elderly woman to knitting sweaters.

Now, in all fairness, the woman did go around and slash tires. Apparently all of her cries for the neighbors to get off of her lawn resulted in them putting cars on her street, and she didn't like that one bit, either. Apparently, she forgot the key point about cars with slashed tires, and how they don't go very far, and she forgot that point around 50 times. When given the original fine, she even admitted that she couldn't pay. Now, in plenty of places, not being able to pay for your criminal actions results in jail time, even if you're over 80 (in America it results in placement into government office more often than not). But in Germany, they decided to make the punishment fit the criminal.

Which is why she has to knit sweaters. When she's done, she's off the hook. We only wonder if she makes them to request, because, if so, we've got some tires she could slash.

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