Tookie And The Left

Jack Dunphy columnist over at nro.com hits the nail on the head:

A headline on page A37 in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times reads: “Large Funeral Planned for Williams, Friend Says.” The brief story that follows tells of preparations being made by Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s longtime friend and collaborator Barbara Becnel to receive the executed man’s body and stage a large public funeral in Los Angeles. The ceremony, the story says, will be “on a scale of the funeral for Rosa Parks.”
So, in the eyes of Barbara Becnel (and, apparently, many others), a man who murdered four helpless people during the commission of two robberies, and who is sometimes credited with founding a street gang responsible for thousands of additional murders, is deserving of no less a tribute than that given to a pioneer of the civil-rights movement. This is what passes for enlightened thinking on the fringes of the American Left, which for years has lionized such homicidal thugs as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Yasser Arafat, and which now very noisily places Tookie Williams, like convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal before him, in this pantheon of heroes. How long will it be before someone proposes to name an elementary school after him?
http://www.nationalreview.com/dunphy/dunphy200512160821.asp

In a related story:

New Tookie Book Warns Kids About Lethal Injection
http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=2097