I just don't get all the push for Stanley "Tookie" Williams. The guy murdered four people, including an entire family. All the celebrities who are coming out of the woodwork to lobby Arnold for commuting Williams' sentence really take the prize. Do they do anything for all the victims, black victims, of crimes that go on every day in California. Do they do anything about gang violence? Jeff Jacoby has some more information on the sainted Tookie.

Unlike the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were horrific: He shot each of them at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused him. "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," Williams bragged after killing Albert Owens. According to the district attorney's summary of the evidence, "Williams then made gurgling or growling noises and laughed hysterically about Owens's death."

As cofounder of the deadly Crips street gang in 1971, Williams's criminal legacy goes well beyond the four murders for which he was convicted. The gang violence he unleashed 34 years ago has destroyed thousands of lives and left countless other victims scarred by rape, assault, and armed robbery. Though he now claims to have reformed and has written books with an antigang message, he has never admitted his guilt or expressed any remorse for the slaughter of Albert Owens and the Yang family. If his supposed contrition amounts to anything more than lip service, he has yet to prove it. Williams adamantly refuses to be debriefed by police about the Crips and their operations or to provide any information that could help bring other killers to justice. In fact, officials at San Quentin have said he continues to orchestrate gang activity from behind bars.

As Stanley Crouch writes today,

The hard fact is that since 1980, street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles, which is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900, the highest tide of racial murder in the history of the nation.

Why don't they spend their time campaigning against that instead of glorifying this founder of one of the worst gangs? I guess that isn't as an attractive a cause for the glitterati crowd as campaigning for one guy responsible for many deaths. Why don't they work hard to stop gang violence. They could start by thinking about the connection between certain types of music and violence. But that doesn't get them as riled up as the death of one murdererer does. A murderer is apparently, so much more appealing than a dead victim.