This morning, I went to court for hit-and-run vehicular manslaughter, and I'm happy to say I skated. Acquitted on all charges. Celebrate with me!
I still remember that morning last July. I was late for a very important meeting about the mortgage crisis and the impact it was having on my company. I had overslept because I had stayed up late the night before watching Glenn Beck. He is a treasure.
Anyway, the highway forensics team later determined I was doing about 138 mph. I don't really know exactly how fast I was going because, in one hand, I was texting my boss to tell him I was late, and in the other hand I was trying to finish my usual drive-time cig. I didn't even really see the man who'd gotten out of his pickup truck to change his flat on the freeway shoulder. I just heard the loud thump as I clipped him and sent him flying into the nearby hedges, where he was later found dead of severe trauma and internal bleeding.
Sure, I thought about stopping. Continuing on was not a decision I made lightly, and it is important that the American people know that. But I was really late. In fact, I had never been this late before. I did not want to set a dangerous precedent by downplaying the importance of promptness. Especially in a post-mortgage crisis world in which literally everything had changed. This was not a black and white issue. I made the best decision I knew how to make at the time, under the circumstances.
I also knew that the man I had struck down was in all likelihood an illegal immigrant. When you've lived in Southern California as long as I have, you can just tell these things. And it turns out I was right.
Somehow, incomprehensibly, the prosecutor decided to side with the illegals and have me arrested, sending a signal to illegals and would-be illegals that the law will extend them equal or greater protection than real Americans.
This was not the America I grew up in. Was any consideration given to the fact that the illegal immigrant I had cut down would never go on to rob a convenience store or rape someone's daughter? Not a moment's consideration, I'm sad to say. I was square in the sights of a political witch hunt.
Of course, everyone told me to keep my mouth shut, but I felt I had a duty to speak out in my own defense. While there were those eager to make me the criminal, I knew real Americans would understand that it was our porous border with Mexico that allowed that man to put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I knew that if I sent my daughter out onto the talk show circuit, that probably wouldn't hurt either.
When it came time to be judged by a jury of my peers, I waived my right to counsel and just told the truth. I told them that I had some photos locked up in a safe at home that showed the dead illegal stalking young girls and making bombs. The prosecuting attorney objected, telling me to produce the evidence. I argued that it was incredibly presumptuous of him to present himself as an expert on the topic of photos he hadn't even seen, and called on the company that made the safe to open that safe and release those photos, so the court could know the truth that I knew. [Predictably, they did not comply. I suspect that they were complicit in the effort to smear my good name.]
Well, I guess that ironclad argument made the prosecutor desperate, because he went on this crazy rant about how "the law is the law, and the law says, 'you can't drive recklessly and cut a man down,' not, 'you can't drive recklessly and cut a man down unless that man is a criminal.'" Who knows what that was supposed to mean, right?
In the end, the jury saw things my way. I knew they would. After all, I'm the American here. Not that other guy. And Southern California itself is a safer place today because of what happened last July.
Isn't that what it's all about?