Opinion: In today’s pages: Civil Gideon, civic depression, Uighurs, Afghans -- and Bratton
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On Monday’s editorial page, The Times takes a look at LAPD Chief William J. Bratton’s campaign commercial for city attorney candidate Jack Weiss and doesn’t like what it sees.
Bratton, thankfully, is no [Daryl] Gates, but his political activity on behalf of his boss, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is unbecoming, just as the Christopher Commission warned. His endorsement of Weiss for city attorney is worse — not because Weiss is an unworthy candidate but because of the office he is seeking. Should Weiss win, he would be responsible for representing the Police Department and its officers and for negotiating with plaintiffs who bring lawsuits against the LAPD. That argues for a respectful but arm’s length relationship, not one of political debts. Bratton should study his history, and stay out of city politics.
The page also calls for the release of Uighurs held improperly at Guantanamo Bay, and notes that the moral argument against the death penalty is only enhanced by the fact that holding condemned prisoners pending execution is prohibitively expensive.
On the Op-Ed page, USC law professor Clare Pastore makes the case for legal services funding and ‘civil Gideon’ -- recognizing a right to provide counsel to the indigent in civil cases just as the Sixth Amendment requires in criminal cases.
Cheryl Benard, co-director of the Alternative Strategies Initiative at the Rand Corp., says the international community isn’t helping in Afghanistan when it obsesses about Hamid Karzai, talks about removing him, and plays into the nation’s ‘dysfunctional personality cult.’
To venerate new leaders as demigods, only to demote them to villains within the space of a few years, is not a recipe for successful nation-building. Afghans need to honor the laws and the institutions of their new democracy and to stop focusing so excessively on the individuals who govern them. They need standards of conduct, rules obeyed both by the leader and his kin and cronies, pragmatic expectations — and, when they sour on their leaders, an established process of political succession that does not include murder.
And columnist Gregory Rodriguez examines the societal costs of loneliness and alienation.
We have to stop looking at declining civic participation as a primarily political problem that is solvable through increased activism. Although activism may increase participation, which in turn translates into less social isolation, it does not get to the deeper problem of the quality of connections we form with the people who surround us on a day-to-day basis.
*Photo: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times