GretaVanSusteren – ILANA MERCER https://www.ilanamercer.com Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:56:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The Colosseum Of Courtroom Cretins https://www.ilanamercer.com/2013/07/colosseum-courtroom-cretins/ Fri, 19 Jul 2013 07:33:07 +0000 http://imarticles.ilanamercer.com/?p=2514 American mainstream media is a Colosseum of cretins. Take the attorney for the Trayvon Martin family, Jasmine Rand. Ms. Rand objected to the acquittal of Mr. Zimmerman, in the case brought against him by the State of Florida, by declaring the following to Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren: “I have a greater duty beyond being [...Read On]

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American mainstream media is a Colosseum of cretins.

Take the attorney for the Trayvon Martin family, Jasmine Rand. Ms. Rand objected to the acquittal of Mr. Zimmerman, in the case brought against him by the State of Florida, by declaring the following to Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren: “I have a greater duty beyond being an attorney and that is to be a social engineer.” Jasmine further asserted that the Jury had not listened to the evidence and had not followed the law. Since she and “millions of people” did not like the manner in which the law of the land related to the evidence on hand—a relationship the jury grasped well—Rand was of the mindset that her mandate as an officer of the court was to “march” to reverse the verdict.

Rand’s bio details, displayed at the law firm of Parks & Crump, L.L.C., indicate that she “received her juris doctor degree from Florida State University College of Law” and that she “served on the Black Law Students Association board and won its Outstanding Member of the Year Award in 2007.” Jasmine is also “adjunct professor at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University.”

Old-school—likely high IQ—Greta Van Susteren was rattled. “Deeply disturbed,” as the understated lawyer-turned-TV host put it. She inquired as to what grounds young Jasmine had for her claims against the Zimmerman jury. Was the jury not vetted by the prosecution and the defense alike? What evidence had Jasmine stumbled upon that the jury had missed, probed Van Susteren, Socratically.

When no coherent answer was forthcoming—and seized by passion for certain verities she had clearly taken for granted—the older woman, whose law degree is from Georgetown University, and whose undergraduate degree is in science, proceeded to explain to Ms. Rand how the American legal system was supposed to work. I paraphrase:

A jury of citizens is presented with the evidence in trial. A judge then instructs the jury on the law. The jury is trusted with applying the law as stated by the judge to arrive at a decision based on the facts presented as evidence in trial.

The “Rules for Deliberation” imposed on this jury also specified that: 1) “This case must be decided only upon the evidence that you have heard from the testimony of the witnesses and have seen in the form of the exhibits in evidence and these instructions.” 2) “This case must not be decided for or against anyone because you feel sorry for anyone, or are angry at anyone.” 3) “Your verdict should not be influenced by feelings of prejudice, bias or sympathy. Your verdict must be based on the evidence, and on the law contained in these instructions.”

A rattled Greta kept going:

“You know as I know that the millions of people who may not like the decision did not watch the case, didn’t sit in the courtroom, didn’t weigh the evidence, and didn’t listen to jury instructions. What you’re talking about is just noise. Social manipulation. Justice is presented in a courtroom. That’s why we have a court system so that both sides are presented with the opportunity to be heard. I don’t know what ‘social engineering’ is but justice is presented in the court room.”

In the course of doing her journalistic due diligence, Van Susteren stumbled upon another falsity peddled by the administration’s front man, Attorney General Eric Holder, mass media and the rest of the “Racial Industrial Complex.”

The slick-tongued Holder had told his primary constituency, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that “people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat,” and that “‘Stand Your Ground’-style laws —such as the one that figured into the George Zimmerman case—’undermine public safety,’ and ‘create dangerous conflicts in our neighborhoods.'”

Why then did the “Instructions read to the Zimmerman jury by The Honorable Debra S. Nelson, Circuit Judge,” state the reverse? Again, I excerpt from Justice Nelson’s instructions on the “Justifiable Use of Force”:

“If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in anyplace where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

It just so happens that Zimmerman was unable to retreat. As the facts showed, conclusively, Tryavon Martin was atop, pounding Zimmerman into the ground. By trial’s end, the prosecution no longer disputed this unassailable fact.

Holder’s lie was compounded by the fact that, as Van Susteren discovered in the course of digging in federal statutes, the law generally recognizes the right of the person who is not the aggressor to stand his ground. The concept of standing your ground is a fundamental basic right of self-defense.

Exclaimed an exacerbated Van Susteren:”The whole thing of stand your ground is confusing everybody. It is just [plain] self-defense.”

My exhibit 2 of the Idiocracy elite is Glenda Hatchett, of the CNN brain trust. Not only does Judge Hatchett lack knowledge and feel for law, but she struggles with analytical and deductive thinking. This has not stopped the woman from becoming judge and host of the indubitably lucrative “Judge Hatchett.”

It is a shame that the July 12 CNN transcripts can’t convey the look on Judge Alex Ferrer’s face when Hatchett ventured the following:

Hatchett: “… I did have an interesting question today. Someone said to me, well, judge, why didn’t George just pull his gun and say, ‘I’m the neighborhood watch, stay where you are until the police gets here.’ I mean, he’s the one who has the gun. Why didn’t he do that?”

Ferrer: “He doesn’t have a right to do that because that would be an aggravated assault. … he would have [no] legal right to pull a gun on somebody who’s not committing a crime.”

Judge Hatchett “thinks” that George Zimmerman would have been acting within the lawful purview of a neighborhood watchman had he held up an innocent young man at gun point.

Greta Van Susteren was having a hard time with the realization that her beloved law was increasingly held hostage by the likes of Jasmine Rand, Esquire. Countless are the human exhibits this column could present for the case that the elephant in the courtroom is an Idiocracy elite. And that, like very scary prosecutor turned CNN commentator Sunny Hostin, this Idiocracy elite lacks the ability to separate the political constructs (racism) to which it is wedded from the facts of a case brought in a court of law.

If the trial of George Zimmerman taught us anything at all it is that debate in mass media is monopolized by a noisy, all-powerful elite of idiots to whom reason is racism.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WNDEconomic Policy Journal &
American Daily Herald

July 19

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EVIL, NOT ILL https://www.ilanamercer.com/2007/04/evil-not-ill/ Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://imarticles.ilanamercer.com/evil-not-ill/ Be it for his piss-poor prose or his menacing mien, mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho received little corrective feedback toward the end of his brief and brutal life. And probably for most of it. Consequently, when Cho, who murdered 32 students and faculty members at Virginia-Tech, got his firearms, the mandatory background check he underwent came [...Read On]

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Be it for his piss-poor prose or his menacing mien, mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho received little corrective feedback toward the end of his brief and brutal life. And probably for most of it. Consequently, when Cho, who murdered 32 students and faculty members at Virginia-Tech, got his firearms, the mandatory background check he underwent came back as clean as mine; as a legal permanent resident of the United States, I too was checked out when I purchased my piece.

The background check conducted by the owner of Roanoke Firearms revealed nothing of  Cho’s deviant displays over the past two years, because the authorities Cho brushed up against kept it that way. Stalking two students, taking pictures of women under desks, terrorizing his teachers, setting a fire in a dorm room—all met with laissez faire and leniency from police.

Cho had passed through the university disciplinary system, but that too resulted in counseling recommendations rather than consequences. Cho was not even considered a suspect in earlier bomb threats the university received, and for which, as it transpired, he was responsible. Police and campus authorities responded to Cho’s stalking, pyromania, and voyeurism by medicalizing his misbehavior. As the nation’s pseudo-experts generally advise, Cho was referred to a mental health facility.

There were exceptions. Cho’s poetry teacher, Nikki Giovanni, uses the word evil to describe him. She refused to put up with his intimidating presence in her classroom, and had Cho removed.

American youngsters are notoriously tolerant of deviance, which they’ve been taught to think of as quaint, cool, or a sign of individualism. The more multicultural and left-liberal a society, moreover, the more it will lack shared norms of decorum, and the less its members will expect civility from one another. Incivility is often construed as difference. Which is why anti-social, sullen, scheming gruffness is currently being framed as “shyness”—the hallmark of a “troubled young man,” a “loner.” When the photos of the killer in full regalia surfaced, some students even wondered if this was his way of “reaching out.”

Classroom etiquette, such that it is, doesn’t necessarily exclude chatting on one’s cell, wearing Gestapo get-up, a cap, and dark shades. Nor is acting catatonic, apparently, an impediment to reaching senior status at the nation’s schools. Cho, however, was so threatening that students began deserting Giovanni’s poetry class in droves. “The guy’s really creepy,” they complained. Still, to expel Cho from the course, Giovanni had to threaten to resign. English instructor Lucinda Roy and her assistant devised a distress signal in the event Cho became unruly during one-on-one tutoring sessions with Roy.

Enter the tele-experts. Understandably self-serving, they work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not  committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. Even though Cho went about his business meticulously and methodically, liberals (and, increasingly, conservatives) toss the concept of free will to the wind. They acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

The doctors who examined Cho in December 2005 were more honest than the Drew Pinsky-type sorcerers the networks inflict upon their viewers. They found that he was “depressed,” but of normal “insight” and “judgment.” In retrospect, his wise teacher, Nikki Giovanni—also the only one to use the E-word—would have to admit he acted in character: purposeful and brutal, never frazzled or faltering. Contrary to Pinsky’s “ideation,” the mass murder at Virginia-Tech was not a mental breakdown, but a mission accomplished. Cho was evil in action.

Between his early and late morning killing sprees, Cho paid a visit to a Blacksburg post office. There, he mailed a “multimedia manifesto” to the NBC television network. His thinking was, once again, rational. Having developed a good feel for the campus police’s ineptness, Cho had no qualms about postponing the gruesome finale he had in store for a bit. He was equally astute about placing his trust in the media. Cho knew they would disseminate his feral fulminations, instantiated on QuickTime video, far and near. He knew that, entrusted to smut purveyors like Nancy Grace and Greta van Susteren, the manner in which he likened himself to Christ, and blamed rich kids, hedonism, and Christianity for his failings, would, eventually, become a cult event with apostles.

The experts will now contend falsely that they could have calibrated the killer differently; that their ministrations might have prevented the murderer from murdering. The logic? A killer is not evil, but ill. The witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer. The irony is that Cho was compliant. When he commenced the countdown to the crime, as the LA Times reported, he “began rising earlier, sometimes by 5:30 a.m., to put in his contact lenses, apply his acne medicine, and to take his prescription pills.” (Emphasis added.) The pills didn’t stop Cho, because evil is not an illness to be excised. Like good, evil is a human propensity, to be rejected or pursued.

A well-aimed bullet would have stopped Cho. But gun-free zones are not the only areas in need of reclamation. The concept of the individual as a responsible, self-determining agent is the foundation of a free society. Liberty requires that psychiatric mumbo-jumbo not be allowed to oust morality.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com  

   April 20

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