I haven't been following this case in Florida — apparenty, this year's Crime of the Century — where a woman named Casey Anthony was charged with murdering her two-year-old daughter who was, the D.A. insisted, becoming an inconvenience to a life of partying. It's not that I don't care about life and death and justice but as we've learned by now, it's easy to get so interested in these matters that you feel like you have to follow every teensy development…and the media has found it lucrative to pump out a constant flow of teensy developments. Some of them are even true.
Heck, I'm having enough trouble not following the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case…and that ain't easy because it always seems to be hogging the margins of every news-oriented page that I actually want to read. Apparently, the latest there is that the alleged victim is being called a hooker and a drug dealer and she therefore couldn't possibly have been raped because, you know, no one ever rapes women involved in shady dealings. This seems like the mirror image of Ben Stein's stupid assertion that Strauss-Kahn couldn't be a rapist because economists don't do that kind of thing. The main conclusion I've come to in that case is that a lot of people are writing theories about what happened despite the fact that there are gaping holes in the public knowledge of what the evidence shows and what each side is saying transpired.
Anyway, back to Casey Anthony. The main thing I know about that trial is that TV trial-monger Nancy Grace long ago convicted Ms. Anthony in a couple of tirades. So when today's Not Guilty verdict came in, I tweeted the following…
What the jury probably wanted to do was turn Casey Anderson loose and sentence Nancy Grace to Death Row.
That's not a bad joke and it would have been a wee bit better if I'd gotten the lady's name right. It's Anthony, not Anderson. But Googling, I see that I'm hardly the only one to make this mistake. I count more than fifty news sites and folks who you'd think would be more accurate than the guy who writes Groo the Wanderer, all making the same mistake, often on pages where they also get it right. I guess that's part of where I got it.
The other part is that Casey Anderson is a character in the movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. She's the one at the end (and in a flash-forward at the outset) who gets killed by a gun in her mouth. Maybe Nancy Grace should turn her efforts on crimes like that…you know, fictitious ones to go along with the fictitious reporting she does.