On the Saturday, August 3, Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, after a discussion of the sentencing of rapist and kidnapper Ariel Castro, host Melissa Harris-Perry made an over the top comparison between the house Castro built to hold his sexual assault victims and institutions like colleges and the military.
As she segued from the Castro case to a discussion of the problem of sexual assault in the military, the MSNBC host began:
Sometimes it is astonishing what the hosts at MSNBC will say with such ease that to most Americans comes across as extreme. Chris Hayes once declared on Memorial Day weekend that he felt "uncomfortable" calling our fallen military “heroes.” But on the August 1 All In w/ Chris Hayes, in which Hayes commented on kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro, “there was a tiny, slight pin prick of empathy in me.”
Aren't MSNBC hosts the staunch opponents of a "War Against Women"? Castro pled guilty to kidnapping three women and raping them repeatedly over a period of 10 years. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 1,000 years for his horrific crimes. Despite the horrific nature of his crimes, because Castro claimed during his sentencing that he “was a victim of sex acts when I was a child” Hayes feels the need to empathize with him.
Abbe Smith, who has written an almost 1,500-word column for the Washington Post, is described as "a professor of law and the director of the Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic at Georgetown University."
The title of her column is "What motivates a lawyer to defend a Tsarnaev, a Castro or a Zimmerman?" -- as if defending an alleged terrorist killer of three and maimer of hundreds, a imprisoner of multiple women and killer of pre-born babies (who yesterday pleaded guilty to the former and will escape the death penalty), and a man who killed an assailant only because he thought he would die if he didn't are all virtually equally problematic. Excerpts follow the jump.