Our View - Thursday

Gotcha games

Senator says: ‘You all look alike’

State Sen. Shawn Mitchell said something funny while the Colorado Senate worked on the Trial Lawyers’ Bill of 2008. During debate, Senate President Peter Groff and Majority Leader Ken Gordon — two liberal Democrats — stood together near the podium. Mitchell, a Republican who opposed the bill, mistakenly addressed Gordon as Groff. It was a noteworthy gaffe, because Gordon and Groff look nothing alike. Gordon is short, white and pushing 60. Groff is tall, black and young. If Mitchell’s confusion reflects anything deep, it would only be a commendable aspect of his character. At most, the slip says Mitchell pays little attention to looks, race or age.

Having mistaken the two, Mitchell immediately did what politicians do to lighten the mood. He told an off-the-cuff joke.

“Excuse me, Mr. President. You all look alike to me,” Mitchell said.

LOL, that was hilarious! It said that despite differences of race, and obvious differences in age and height, Mitchell saw two liberals. The joke said race, height and age don’t matter — that what matters is ideology, in which case Gordon and Groff are the same. It’s antithetical to the grotesque biases of racism, which would hold Groff and Mitchell as vastly different men, for superficial reasons, regardless of politics.

“But let’s say, hypothetically, that Mitchell’s comment had some distant connection to the racist comment that people of Heritage X ‘all look alike.’ Then the force of Mitchell’s comment would be to make fun of that racist comment. It’s not racist to make fun of racists,” wrote Ari Armstrong, on the blog www.freecolorado.com.

In the days of “gotcha” politics, however, honest insight and analysis have no place. Instead of evoking laughter, Mitchell’s comment drew harsh reaction. Sen. Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, was presiding over the Senate when the comment was made. Shaffer explained later that he should have struck down the gavel and pointed out that Mitchell’s comment was inappropriate. As the day wore on, Mitchell found himself backed against the ropes, trying to defend himself against racism charges, barely keeping the tar and feathers at bay.

“My attempted joke was that a tall black man and a short white man look alike to me because of their liberal politics,” Mitchell told a reporter.

Unfortunately, Mitchell should learn that weak minds don’t discern between jokes about racists jokes about race. And he should learn that dishonest players will gladly fuel confusion, even by exploiting race, for the sake of cheap political gain.

The progressive Web site www.ProgressActionNow.org pounced on Mitchell’s comment, calling it “tasteless above all.” The organization deemed Mitchell’s explanation “weak as hell.” It’s the same group that started a boycott against conservative radio host Jon Caldara because he used a common, though inappropriate term. ProgressActionNow exploited the issue of domestic abuse, saying Caldara used the term “b--ch slap” to encourage wife beating.

The Web site of a liberal organization known as IndependentBasis tried to characterize Mitchell’s quote as a racist gaffe, printing his comment like this: “You [blacks] all look the same to me.” Never mind that one of the men at the podium was white.

Mitchell will likely survive the controversy, but only because Groff — who’s obviously a stand-up politician — came to his defense. Mitchell should thank Groff profusely. In the world of gotcha politics, perception — dismissive of logic, meaning and motive — can quickly end a career.

Behind bars

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world — per capita and in raw numbers. Even China, three times larger, has fewer humans behind bars than the United States has. A study released Feb. 28 by the Pew Center on the States reports the U.S. incarceration rate is eight times greater than that of any other industrialized nation. For the first time in the country’s history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail.

It’s no wonder the United States economy seems headed for shambles. A culture on a crusade to imprison more and more people isn’t well. It’s delusional, following a self-destructive path, unable to distinguish wealth from poverty.

Incarceration should serve no purpose other than to protect the innocent from violent predators. Using a cage to punish nonviolent criminals makes no sense. Yet the War on Drugs is the only reason jail and prison populations have gone up steadily for the past 30 years — an era in which violent crime has steadily decreased. More than half of all federal prisoners are in prison because of the drug war — most of whom pose no threat of violence to others.

So that politicians can sell tough-on-crime platforms, our states collectively spent nearly $50 billion on corrections in 2007, up from $11 billion in 1987. In Kentucky, the inmate population has increased by 600 percent in 30 years.

Society feeds, shelters and clothes every single prisoner. But the cost is far greater. Each dependent prisoner represents one human who no longer produces and contributes to the economy. And it gets worse. When fathers become prisoners — wards of the state who can’t contribute — they leave behind children who typically become dependent upon the collective.

No economic advantage comes from a prisoner. Each and every prisoner is pure liability.

A healthy society views prisons as necessary evils — options of last resort to protect the public from violence. It views prisoners as liabilities, and free humans as assets. A healthy society works hard to minimize prison populations, for the sake of limiting liabilities and helping the common good. In the United States, we’ve somehow mistaken prisoners as assets. We’ve purchased a lie, sold by politicians looking for easy political gain. It’s a sick and twisted perspective, and one that threatens to break us.