Please let me slumber on

BY TONY BOUZA

I am so old now that I regularly resist the few entreaties I receive to express my piddling thoughts. Yet I need to express my thanks to Dick Cheney (he should've been Nixon's V. P.) for dynamiting me out of my lethargy.

Here is a man who seems to have inspired criminals lecturing us on how he saved the nation. Thanks a lot!

In Chicago a cop filled Death Row with innocent black men he'd tortured into false confessions. A conservative Republican governor (George Ryan, himself in prison now for fraud) emptied the warren of the condemned, outraged by the grotesque distortion of justice. This cop, like Cheney, had kept us safe. Thanks a lot!

Ah, the law and order types—how they embrace their truths. And weren't our Founding Fathers a bunch of liberal wimps with their dreams of expensive1 freedoms?

It took me a long time to discover that the Constitution allows for very tough law enforcement—wiretaps, surveillance, death penalties (yes it does), arrest, seizing, shootings and other tough tactics. It just asks for evidence on which to act. How very unreasonable
.
Now we wonder whether we should have a Special Prosecutor over allegations of criminality by CIA agents and other officials. Haven't they kept us safe?
Hadn'l Chicago been made safe by its Law and Order fillers of the Heath Chamber?

Arrant nonsense!

God protect the Republic from its self-ordained protectors. What should President Ohama have done? A Senator was "horrified" by disclosures of governmental tortures and abuses.

Are we a nation of laws or men? It's clear how Cheney would choose. President Obama did not want to seem too excessive a i_ri tic of his predecessor and was clearly reluctant to ,ippe,ir vindictive. Still, he had no choice. If the law was broken, then-had to be an accounting. None of us has a choice.

When I was named Chief of Police in Minneapolis on February 11, 1980, I said I would do a Day One Operation and look forward unless my gaze was forced backward. As it happened it was, and 1 had to investigate—and punish—police wrongdoing in an incident that pre-dated my arrival by months. There was no choice, The law demanded—and demands—an answer. These guys always say they are protecting us. Our real protection is the law that shields us from abusers of power. And, while I'm about it, why not answer a couple of other questions I get asked: Wasn't Obama wonderful in organizing a Beer Fest Kumbaya for Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley? He was not.

He was stupid to call a whole police department stupid. He was wrong to dissuade Gates from undertaking a suit that would have really settled the issues of right, wrong and racism [I'm addicted to alliterations], and-he was nuts to turn Crowiey into a hero to some beer-willing associates.

I believe in lough police tactics.
I support the death penalty.
I used decoys, stings ,and stakeouts.
I applied for and served search and wiretap warrants and insisted on very tough enforcement of our criminal and traffic laws. The Constitution allows and supports all of it.

So, I'll just ask vice presidents and aggressive cops to puhleezc stop let-turing me on how safe you're milking me and observe the simple law.

Thanks a lot!.