“He did his time and paid his debt to society,” you say. “He’s a changed man. Leave him alone!”
No, I don’t think so. His actions have had consequences, and just saying “Whoops, sorry” doesn’t fix things. Jacquielynn Floyd at the Dallas Morning News takes a look at Mel, one of Vick’s pit bulls who got out of that hellhole alive:
A medium-sized black dog built like a small fireplug, Mel now lives in Dallas. He’s safe, comfortable and secure, but he’s terrified of strangers.
When faced with a new person, he shakes uncontrollably. If not restrained, he’ll cower and retreat to a corner, trying to back himself into invisibility. He fits the classic profile of a recovering torture victim…
Mel, who is now 4 years old, was lucky to survive his first year of life, which was spent at Vick’s Bad Newz Kennel, which bred and fought pit bulls for sport…
Boilerplate shorthand of the now-familiar story has reduced Vick’s crime to “dogfighting,” as if he had strayed over to the wrong side of the tracks for a little tough-guy recreation…
Well, deliberately breeding and forcing dogs to maim one another is ugly business. But Vick’s forgive-and-forget apologists seem to have forgotten how much uglier the story was than garden-variety backwoods dogfighting. They don’t bother to revisit the shockingly cruel violence he and his cronies inflicted on these captive animals.
Winning dogs were kept. The ones that lost or refused to fight were executed, often using inventively cruel methods. Court documents show Vick personally participated in killing at least a half-dozen dogs. Some were hanged, suspended from a crossbar with a nylon rope. Some were drowned, held upside down while their heads were forced into a bucket of water.
One was killed when Vick and one of his partners seized it by the legs and slammed it repeatedly to the ground, breaking its neck and back.
Other dogs at the “kennel” – an awfully nice name for what was really a charnel house for helpless animals – were reportedly electrocuted, shot or forced to breed until their bodies just gave out.
And these guys did this for fun.
You don’t have to agree with Tucker that Vick deserves the death penalty. (I don’t, for one.) Go ahead and applaud the Eagles for giving him another chance. But please spare us your righteous indignation. Save it for somebody who deserves it. Michael Vick doesn’t.
P.S. A must-read from Walter Hudson at NewsReal: Of Dogs and Men: How the Tucker Carlson / Michael Vick Flap Reveals the Left’s Moral Degeneracy.
P.P.S. Tucker to Hannity: “This is what happens when you get too emotional… Of course I don’t think he should be executed.”