Bill Cosby - Rapist in Disguise

I never found Bill Cosby funny at all, but many people did and he was enormously popular. He evolved into America's father figure, a person to look up to and respect. He was the first black actor to have equal billing in a television show starring with Robert Culp in I Spy, attained success as a stand-up comic, created the Fat Albert franchise, was a spokesman for Jello-O, and in the 1990's, reached a peak in his popularity with The Bill Cosby Show. He was the lovable Cliff Huxtable, the family man who doled out fatherly advice to his children as seamlessly as Cosby's pharmacist doled out Quaaludes to him.

Doctor of Humane Letters

Along the way, Cosby garnered honorary degrees from more than a dozen universities, including Doctor of Humane Letters. He became the compassionate educator of young, black youth. However, he alienated a lot of African Americans when he waxed philosophical about blacks, blaming them for their social woes by saying: 'we have to start holding each other to a higher standard' and 'it's not about color, it's about behavior.' He said, 'We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal.' There you have it. Bill never viewed his drugging and raping women as abnormal behavior.

Andrea Constand

The American public has discovered that not only is Bill Cosby a comedian, actor, author, activist, philanthropist, musician and educator, but also a rapist, liar and adulterer. He was charged in civil court ten years ago with sexual assault by Andrea Constand, a woman who accused him of drugging and assaulting her, but he was able to quietly settle that with money, a broom and a rug.

This charge is back in the spotlight as a result of the stand-up comic Hannibal Buress discussing Cosby in his comedy routine, which was video recorded by a reporter in the audience and then downloaded onto Youtube. Hannibal discusses rape frequently in his stand-up skits, but this time, his comments on Cosby's rape charges went viral almost overnight, putting the spotlight back on Bill's extracurricular activities of pursuing young white women, drugging them and masturbating over their corpses bodies.

However, Hannibal mentions Bill, not because of his indignation over the assaults, but because he's rankled over Bill's disparaging comments about black people. To quote Hannibal:  “It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fuckin’ smuggest old black man persona that I hate. He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the 80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches."

As I wrote about in an earlier article, we now have the dutiful wife standing by. Camille Cosby had to know the guy was a serial philanderer, but did she know he had reached this depth of depravity? This scandal is not going to disappear down a memory hole, so do yourself a favor Camille, take his ass to the cleaners and get on with your life. Nobody blames you.

Why Don't We Just Shoot Condemned Inmates? - Vince Beiser

If we’re going to kill people, there’s only one good way to do it.

No matter what your stance is on the death penalty, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for the man executed by the state of Missouri this morning. Joseph Paul Franklin was, without exaggeration, a white supremacist serial killer. His preferred targets were Jews, blacks, and anyone connected to interracial couples. During a three-year spree beginning in 1977, he murdered at least seven people, may have killed 15 more, and wounded civil rights leaders Vernon Jordan and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt for good measure. His victims include a father of three leaving a bar mitzvah, and two teenage African American boys.

But the most striking thing about Franklin’s case isn’t why he was killed, but how. He was among the first prisoners in America’s history to be executed by lethal injection using only a single drug—the sedative pentobarbital. Ever since lethal injection was introduced in the 1970s,virtually every state has used a combination of three drugs: one to put the inmate to sleep, the next to paralyze his muscles, and the last to stop his heart. That protocol has come under withering fire in recent years, however, from activists and medical professionals citing a growing body of evidence that indicates the process isn’t always as painless as it looks; in many cases, in fact, the prisoner may remain conscious but paralyzed, unable to scream or thrash, as her heart is slowly squeezed to a stop. One result is that chemical companies have stopped selling those drugs to prisons. Hence Missouri’s switch. (Other states are trying different drugs for their own executions.)

I honestly think that if we’re going to execute people, we as a society should have the integrity and the honesty to face up to the fact that that is what we’re doing. But there’s something absurd about this whole debate. Here’s the thing: We—the American body politic—have decided we are going to commit the ultimate act of violence against condemned inmates. That is, we are going to kill them. And yet, having made that decision, it’s as though we are so conflicted about it that we have to tie ourselves in knots trying to carry out this most heinous of acts nicely. We have phased out hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber in an attempt to find a way to kill a man or woman in an inoffensive way. And now we’re trying to find just the right chemical to shoot into a man’s bloodstream to end his life as palateably as possible.

Listen: I oppose the death penalty. I do so primarily for two practical reasons. One, I believe our legal system and human beings in general are so imperfect that we can never know for certain that we have convicted the right person. Two, the death penalty is applied in such an arbitrary way, and the deck with which it’s dealt out is so blatantly stacked against those with no money and/or dark skin that it can’t be considered “justice” in any remotely meaningful sense.

That said, I honestly think that if we’re going to execute people, we as a society should have the integrity and the honesty to face up to the fact that that is what we’re doing. By all means, let’s do it in the most humane way: strap them to a gurney, just as we do with lethal injection, and then shoot them in the head.

Why not? Because it’s barbaric? No more so than other forms of killing. A bullet to the head is a quick and painless way to die, far quicker and more certain than lethal injection, or any of our other historically favored methods.

Because who would pull the trigger? If it seems too much to have someone actually standing there holding the pistol, the gun could be mounted on a stand and triggered remotely by an executioner standing unseen in an adjacent room. Again, that’s how lethal injection is typically carried out.

Because it would create a sickening mess? Yes, it would. That would require some special preparations and clean-up. But again, that process would leave no doubt as to what actually happened.

Let me say again: We should abolish the death penalty. But if we’re going to have it, let’s stop pretending that we’re doing anything nobler than actually killing people.

Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles, California.