Mark Steyn was on Hugh Hewitt today (as is his wont on Wednesdays), and he used this phrase. I almost jumped, as this is just what I was reaching for in my previous post, Dafydd: Can Celebrities Be Convicted Anymore?, where I suggested it was no longer possible to convict important celebrities of any serious crime — a crime where being guilty means being evil (murder, attempted murder, rape, molestation, armed robbery, and so forth).
Steyn did not elaborate overmuch, but I understood he was inadvertently creating a general case from which my observation could easily be deduced… namely, that we have entered an era in which we simply expect our celebrities to be deviant, decadent, narcissistic, and even nihilist, and we do not hold it against them when they live down to our expectations.
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You can read the autopsy report here. (Link via How Appealing.)
I’ll have to read it later. Here’s what seemed significant to me after a brief lunchtime glance: her brain was half the size it should have been; there is no conclusion as to whether she was in a PVS, as that diagnosis must be made of a living person; she probably could not have learned to swallow on her own; there are indications of “cortical blindness”; it’s unclear whether she suffered from bulimia; she apparently did not have a heart attack; there are no signs of strangulation (though this is based primarily upon medical records and not the pathological examination); and there is no sign of trauma (though here again the report relies heavily on contemporaneous records).
Take a look and tell me what you see.
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The head of the L.A. Times op-ed page, Andres Martinez, has a commentary this morning titled Who’ll Apologize for the Filibuster? Martinez’s excellent piece, from which I’ll quote extensively, reinforces my observation that the paper’s news editors missed the filibuster angle inherent in the Senate’s recent apology for its failure to pass anti-lynching laws:
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