When I was a teen, one of my many unsavory friends was an ex-convict. He shot a cop. He didn't kill him. He just shot him. This foul deed was done in the course of a warehouse burglary. By the time I knew him, he was late to one of my many unsavory friends' poker games, because, as was explained in due course at said game, he was busy robbing another warehouse. But as soon as his rehabilitated work was done, he'd be there.
He was a friend. Not a close friend, but a friend. My close friend at that time was his brother Joe. They were both soon dead. My friend, a passenger victim of his drunk driver; my close friend, Joe, a gun victim. (He felt his sister had been insulted in a bar, whereupon, poetically, he retrieved his .38 from his car. The bartender was waiting with his own. Kaboom. End of close friend.)
But I digress. My friend, the cop shooter, received and served a sentence of four years at the state penitentiary. His dearest advice to me was that if I ever found myself in that hellhole, I should 1) excuse my being raped as a testing system — would I rat? — and 2) always stuff some magazines inside my tucked shirt, as a defense against any provoked, or unprovoked, stabbing.
Four years. He didn't defraud the citizens of the United States. He didn't cheat them out of millions in taxes. He didn't help elect a corrupt, ignorant POTUS. And he didn't spend years flowering up a bunch of corrupt, foreign dictators.
"Judge Ellis told a packed courtroom in Alexandria, Va. that anyone who didn’t think [his Manafort] punishment was tough enough should 'go and spend a day, a week in jail or in the federal penitentiary.'"
True enough. But who believes Mr. Manafort will spend one day in a maximum security penitentiary, rather than a minimum security resort? In fact, who believes Mr. Manafort will spend any time serving his sentences?
Pardon?
And who did the worse harm to the people of the U.S.? My friend? Or Mr. Manafort?