Some progressive journalists don’t just root for violent criminals, who they view as victims of society. They also make excuses for violent animals, like pit bulls that bite again and again. They view those vicious animals as misunderstood victims, just as they view violent criminals as misunderstood victims of society.
Ira Glass is an NPR journalist who is regarded as such a genius by progressive intellectuals that he received a MacArthur “genius” grant. But how smart is he really?
“NPR’s Ira Glass got a pit and it constantly bit CHILDREN, him & wife & more people. So they gave it prozac & exotic meats to ‘cure’ it and it STILL had to be muzzled 24/7. They stopped having guests over. He says the dog is the victim. Encapsulates an unfortunate liberal mindset” of making excuses for anyone or anything that commits violence.
Ira Glass also supports “criminal justice reform” — policies that make it harder to convict criminals and that reduce incarceration for convicted offenders.
Glass’s travails with the dangerous dog he coddles are described in “A Walking Time Bomb? The Trouble With Ira Glass’s Dog Piney: A Tragedy Waiting to Happen”:
I was driving to visit my 87-year-old Dad last Sunday, as I do every Sunday. It’s usually one of my NPR-listening times, and I caught the famous This American Life on the radio.
But there was a twist. Someone was interviewing Ira Glass, the host, instead of the other way around. If you aren’t familiar with the program, Ira Glass, in an inimitable voice, narrates oddball stories about regular people. He sounds like he was raised by intellectual Martians who expatriated to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He actually grew up in Baltimore.
Ira Glass was talking about his pit bull, Piney. In his oh-too-blasé voice of bored neutrality, I actually sensed some emotion as Ira talked about the constantly muzzled, Prozac-taking, kangaroo-eating pit bull that has changed his and his wife’s life. Mostly for the worst.
AIn a nutshell, Ira and his wife adopted a pit bull pup some seven years ago, and took him to some kind of a wedding celebration with children soon after, where Piney bit two of them. The inference is that the wedding incident changed Piney forever. He has subsequently bitten both Ira and his wife, Anaheed, and several other people.
Ira referred to these bites as “nips.” Nancy Updike, the This American Life interviewer, insisted that if the act draws blood, it is a bite. Ira decided they should be classified as “bloody nips.”
The owners have sought multiple trainers and veterinary advice without improving Piney’s behavior to a socially acceptable level, and the dog’s health is a big problem as well. While it is clear Ira Glass is dedicated to this extremely problematic canine, he seems clueless, or irritatingly smug, about Piney being a walking time bomb.
Ira and his wife now live in a New York City apartment with Piney, in seclusion. No visitors allowed. When Piney sees the light of day, he is muzzled. Ira recounts an incident when, after an early-morning walk, he and Piney returned to the apartment and Piney turned on him. Ira believes the dog was guarding the sleeping wife. He tried to divert Piney’s attack into a tug-of-war play….Toward the end of the segment, the real meat of the problem came to light. How do Ira and his wife justify this type of existence, for them or the dog? Why do they keep doing it? That’s what Updike, a producer who has known Ira for a long time, couldn’t comprehend. Her lack of understanding offended, or seemed to hurt, Ira. This was his explanation:
“It’s really sweet to have this animal that trusts no one and is alone in this world except for us, and he trusts us.”
He raveled on about Piney’s helplessness and dependency.
The interviewer responded, “It’s interesting that you consider him helpless, though, since he lunges at you every day. And you see helplessness behind I think what other people see as aggression.”
I did not hear Ira Glass expressing legitimate concern about the damage a dog like Piney can cause. I thought about the times I have been on the other side of the exam table, faced with desperate owners who are ready to euthanize their version of Piney, because the dog finally mauled somebody, often a family member….
I saw a picture of Piney with a plastic basket muzzle. I don’t know if the muzzle is sufficient protection for the threat he poses. And what about the day there’s a stranger in the hallway, and Anaheed forgets Piney is by the door? What if Ira doesn’t pick up Piney’s hairy eyeball when he’s “guarding” Anaheed, and the dog delivers more than a “bloody nip” to his hand? Perhaps he feels he doesn’t need nerve function in his hand since he’s a radio personality.
I am very familiar with people who call their aggressive dogs “misunderstood” or “confused,” or blame the human for not “reading” the dog properly. This is irrational justification. Owners of aggressive dogs need to own up to the threat and be ready to accept the consequences if a tragedy happens.
Progressive journalists and lawyers don’t just make excuses for pitbulls that bite people again and again. They also make excuses for violent criminals, claiming that all prison inmates should be given a “second chance” to be released, even if they have been sentenced to life without parole for committing an unusually brutal murder. A criminal-justice “reformer” at a Washington, DC think-tank defended proposed legislation that would let even serial killers be released after 15 years if they behave well in prison, writing, “This bill is a good idea and I hope it passes. To oppose this bill by saying that this would allow serial killers to seek release is a flawed argument…Not allowing this to be available as an option at all for incarcerated individuals is basically saying no incarcerated individual is ever deserving of a second chance.”
But as an objector pointed out in opposing that “criminal-justice reform” legislation, many criminals who benefit from such “second-look” legislation have already squandered many chances to reform themselves: “Backers of this legislation argue that ‘everyone deserves a second chance.’ But the bill goes beyond giving offenders a second chance, because it gives even the most persistent reoffenders an opportunity to seek release — offenders who already had and squandered their ‘second chance.’ Most inmates serving more than 15 years have already had their second, third, fourth, and fifth chances — the typical released state prison inmate has five prior convictions, according to Rafael Mangual, a criminal-justice expert at the Manhattan Institute.”
Progressive legislation to reduce incarceration by releasing inmates early is dangerous, because most inmates commit more crimes after being released, even when they are over age 40, and even when they have already served over ten years in prison. 63% of state prison inmates in America are doing time for violent crimes — others are there for serious theft or property crimes — and the typical state prison inmate is a repeat offender with 5 convictions, not there due to indiscriminate “mass incarceration.” Only a tiny percentage of inmates in state prisons are there for drug possession.
Shrinking prison populations by releasing inmates increases the crime rate. Even inmates who are no longer young tend to commit more crimes after being released. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4).
Left-wingers falsely claim America has the world’s highest incarceration rate. It doesn’t. El Salvador’s incarceration rate is triple America’s incarceration rate, and its murder rate fell by over 90% after it increased its incarceration rate, saving thousands of lives.
