When I saw some of the regional DFL talking points bots tweeting that “Pawlenty pardoned a sex criminal!”, I figured this has got to be about as accurate as every other DFL hit meme this past six months.

And having read  the Strib’s telling of the story, I see I was right.  But then, when it comes to the DFL inflating “dirt” about Republicans far beyond anything the facts would justify, the Dems are always in a league of their own.   We saw it with last week’s Hackbarth

Two years ago, Gov. Tim Pawlenty and two other officials pardoned Jeremy Giefer, who had served a short time in jail in the 1990s as a young man for having sex with a 14-year-old girlfriend whom he later married.

So far so good.  Giefer, then 19, got his girlfriend, then 14, pregnant.  It’s illegal, of course; he did his time, and then married the girl when she reached the age of consent at 16. 

So given the facts at hand, the Governor – along with Attorney-General Swanson and then-chief-justice Eric Magnuson – unanimously voted to grant Giefer a “pardon extraordinary”, a qualified pardon granted to people who’ve served their time and, by a set of criteria that are more than a little exclusive, including having completed their sentence for at least ten years.  Pawlenty voted to grant three of them out of ten opportunities.

Blue Earth County prosecutors now say Giefer was sexually assaulting another young girl hundreds of times before and after he received his pardon…charges filed this month allege seven years of abuse by Giefer, now 36, of a girl who is now 17.

Giefer was charged with five counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, five counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, one count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and one count of incest.

The girl told authorities that she had been sexually abused by Giefer more than 250 times since she was 9 years old, according to a criminal complaint.

The county attorney also notes that there was not a solitary hint of the new allegations against Giefer until long after the pardon extraordinary.

Not good enough for the DFL’s chanting-point bots, who apparently think all government officials must be clairvoyant in all their actions.

Allowing for the fact that Gieffer is innocent of the allegations until proven guilty, and that pretty  much everyone agrees that the allegations, if true, are reprehensible (I have to clarify that, since if I don’t some leftyblogger will claim that I’m “supporting sexual abuse of minors”, albeit never to my face), the regional left’s take on this case is curious.

Clairvoyance: Pardons have to be issued on their merits.  Pawlenty (and Magnuson and, let’s remember, DFL Attorney-General Swanson) seemed to have held applicants for pardons extraordinary to a fairly high standard, granting them to a decided minority of applicants.  Those that are bagging on Pawlenty for this pardon seem to want an additional, higher level of proof – the extra-sensory perception of activities utterly unknown to law enforcement in any way, shape or form.   To the left, apparently, the movie Minority Report was a documentary, not sci-fi.

Would we want government to be that clairvoyant, even if it were possible? (All of you who say citizens should just suck it up without question or complaint when the TSA gropes your children at the airport are recused with prejudice)

Pardon Me?:  Isn’t it the left that usually chides the right for being too hidebound on sentencing and punishment?  Or is that only when it comes to election time and the left is courting the felon vote that felons are considered rehabilitated?

Bear in mind, this is not quite the same as Mike Huckabee’s pardon of a violent offender who went on to kill four cops; Giefer showed no evidence of violence, or even coercion (beyond the whole “ick” factor of being a 19 year old knocking up a 14 year old; even in rural Blue Earth county, the “Creepy” formula was and remains “(Age / 2) + 7”.  That’s science, so don’t bother arguing).

But as we discovered in this past governor’s race, what it’s really all about to the DFL is to have a prejudicial sound bite; people who tend to vote liberal will absorb a seven second sound bite (when it can’t be boiled down to a two-second slogan) but be immune to sixty seconds of context-setting.

Pretty ingenious, in a very depressing sort of way.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Democrat Party, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.