Hey, remember the other day here when we were talking about how the Archie people were bringing out a new comic book of The Shield? And remember how I wasn't pleased that in parodying the cover of Captain America #1, they'd credited Jack Kirby for drawing that iconic issue but not his partner Joe Simon? Well, the fine artist who drew that cover for Archie — Dan Parent — wrote me to say it was an unintentional oversight and that Joe's name has been added. Happy ending! Thanks, Dan!
And we see that famed lawyer F. Lee Bailey has died at the age of 87. Mr. Bailey is one of those public figures — and there are quite a number of these — for whom I once had some admiration only to see it wither and die. Even before he took on the colorful case of defending O.J. Simpson, Bailey became a symbol of the main reason people hate attorneys — this notion that the point of any trial is to prove that he, F. Lee Bailey, is so powerful that he will win. Any questions about whodunnit or that unimportant thing called "justice" didn't matter; only the courtroom supremacy of the überlawyer.
I think in some ways he kinda liked the idea that so many people thought that despite the verdict in the criminal case, O.J. was guilty. You could almost imagine the guy saying, "Hey, any lawyer can get an innocent man acquitted. I'm so good, a client can be guilty-as-sin and I can get him off." On talk shows, which he of course loved doing, his main argument that O.J. was innocent seemed to be something like, "I'm F. Lee Bailey and I say he's innocent. That should be proof enough for anyone."
I do remembering him promising to shock the world with a book he was writing — or maybe had written — that would reveal who had really committed the murders Simpson was accused of. Now that Bailey's dead, I guess we'll never know.