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Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Those Who Attack Hillary for Being 'Lawyerly' Don't Understand the Constitution

This was the same problem with people like Stephen A. Smith who thought that of course Tom Brady was guilty or else he wouldn't have 'lawyered up' and he would have 'cooperated' with his own prosecution by handing Roger Goodell and Ted Wells his phone.

Right, because due process is just for guilty people right? If you're innocent you are always treated fairly right?

If this were true, we wouldn't need a Constitution or Bill of Rights.

The whole radical idea of American jurisprudence is that you are innocent until proven guilty-the opposite of in the Old World of Europe where you were guilty until proven innocent.

Hillary has also been criticized for being 'lawyerly'-and the same folks who say this are also treating her as if she's guilty until proven innocent.

They are playing with the old European laws again where someone can make a wild accusation against you and it's on you to show it isn't true. 

I think I wrote a little while back about an episode I watched of Madame Secretary. The heroine of that show is very similar to Hillary-she is of course, also the SOS, and in the episode I watched she was being drilled by the opposition party in Congress-clearly the Republicans.

What I found interesting though is that she was being accused of some awful thing where she could even go to jail, supposedly; again, sound familiar?

Her legal counsel was urging the Secretary to admit nothing, divulge nothing. But she decides to ignore him-she's not going to 'lawyer up'-and she testifies before a hostile Congress.

It looks like she's handed them the goods on her now but being tv there is this Hollywood ending where the nation rallies behind her because she was forthcoming and didn't 'lawyer up.'

Gee, is there a message for Hillary here? We saw a few of her tv shows in the emails that came out-yeah, these emails were that scandalous-but I wonder if she watches SOS. Even if she doesn't regularly she may well know about that one.

But this is Hollywood-which is as ignorant of the Constitution as anyone else. In the real world 'lawyering up' just means asserting your rights. To snidely call it 'lawyering up' shows a person's one disrespect for the very idea of due process and innocent until proven guilty.

In reality you have the right not to incriminate yourself, and Madam Secretary notwithstanding, it's rarely in your interests to do so-no matter how innocent you are.

P,S. We see a similar thing at work here with the IT guy who has pleaded the fifth. Right away the Beltway press tsk-tsks-clearly he's pleading the fifth because he's guilty and what he knows would be damning both to him and Hillary.

Again, due process is not just for guilty people.


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