Memo to the Stanek-whiners: YOU ARE DUMB.
But first, some housekeeping. I skipped a day yesterday. Depending on how long you have been reading YAD, you may have found this strange or abnormal, but it's simply one of the side effects of the You Are Dumb Dot Net Pledge Of Internet Anger Quality, by which you, the reader, deserve a minimum standard of a half-assed column.
Unlike many Internet content providers, I understand the complex balancing act that comes from both wanting content that doesn't suck too, too badly, and the desire to read something, ANYTHING, you haven't read before instead of working. And that's why I promise you, my loyal readers, who stopped by multiple times yesterday to see if I'd managed to pull something out of my butt yet, that if I can't even half-ass 500 words of anger, profanity, and neologisms, then it's best for everyone that I just let it be. You deserve better. You deserve at least the bare minimum of motivation and effort that I can scrape up. I can only bitch about game reviews so many times before you all turn on me and set me on fire, after all.
And anyway, I skipped a Wednesday. Wednesday is New Onion Day. So it's not like you didn't have options.
With that out of the way, we turn to the delicate issue of the Stanek-whiners. Which, for non-Minnesotans and locals who don't follow the news, requires a bit of an explanation.
Rich Stanek was Gov. Pawlenty's choice to become Commissioner of Public Safety. Gov. Pawlenty, for those who may not know, is an asshole. Seriously. You all made fun of us for picking Jesse Ventura, but at least he was the kind of asshole you could respect. Pawlenty's just a classic "fuck all y'all" Modern Republican cronyist fuckwad. Jesse did a lot of stuff I didn't like, but there's no way in hell he'd be running around scraping up money for stadiums, attacking gay marriage, screwing over the poor... as much, and appointing racist cops.
Rich Stanek was a racist cop, you see. Twelve years ago, in a police brutality suit which alleged that Stanek beat the living hell out of a melatonin-rich individual who hit his car, Stanek gave a deposition. And in that deposition, he admitted to telling racist jokes and throwing the n-word around like it was confetti at the Macy's parade. Oh, and this was the second time he'd been sued for beating up someone he'd stopped for DWB.
So this came out. Again. And all the people who should have cared each of the FIVE TIMES he won elections to the state House and this came up finally got their act together, and it got some play in the media, and he resigned. And then the fucking whiners came out of the woodwork.
Biggest whiner of all, of course, was Pawlenty, who started off talking about how concerned he was, and how problematic this was, and the public trust, and how he just found out about this horrible thing when it hit big. A few days later, seeing the whining take hold, he changed his tone. He didn't accept the resignation of his racist cop because he was a racist cop, you see. It's just that people get so upset by racist cops that it would have been difficult for him to get confirmed by the legislature.
"He's changed." "That was 12 years ago." "Watch what you say!" "Political correctness ruining people's lives!" "Partisan warfare!" WHINERS. Stick a plunger in it. Stanek is not some kind of horrible victim here. He gets his old job back (although people are making a bit of a stink about that now, too, so who knows?) A guy who fails to secure a high-paid, high-profile government job merely he beat up a couple of black people and called them names in the 90's is not a CAUSE. This is a bit of karmic payback. You think the $55,000 needed to settle the two brutality suits came out of HIS pocket? No, it came out of the department budget. Which means it came out of OUR POCKETS. And then, for a decade, he got to help make the laws of the state.
Do you hear that? I believe it's an iPod Mini, taken to the lab from Fantastic Voyage, and shrunk down to the size of a red blood cell. And through the tiny, tiny headphones plugged into it, you can hear a low-bitrate MP3 file in which they recorded the world's smallest violin playing the saddest song in the universe. Poor Rich Stanek.
"He's changed." "That was a long time ago." "What about redemption?" Fuck that noise. Even if he's a completely changed man, he was a RACIST COP. On the big list of things that keep us from glorious Utopia, racist cops are easily in the top ten. Racist cops ruin lives permanently. It's taken TWELVE YEARS for this to catch up with Stanek, for him to finally start seeing some consequences, and you whining bastards think he should get a pass now, too? YOU ARE DUMB.