The Right Profile

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When Jacob went missing, Democrat Governor Rudy Perpich called out the National Guard to search for him.  No other kid gets that kind of treatment – Amber alerts hadn’t even been invented.  Why that kid?

 Because Patty Wetterling was connected. And she’s stayed connected – and in the spotlight – for all these years.  Now we’re supposed to leave our porch lights on for her.

 She suffered a terrible loss, no doubt about it.  But what about all the other moms who didn’t get celebrity media treatment?  100 kids a year go missing in stranger abductions.  They don’t have foundations.  They don’t have media coverage.  They’re not connected.  Nobody remembers them.

 I’m not objecting to the compassion shown to Patty Wetterling.  I’m objecting to the lack of compassion shown to everybody else who isn’t as politically connected.  Once again, there are rules for politically connected Democrats, and different rules for the rest of us.  That’s awful.

 Joe Doakes

It wasn’t two years after Wetterling’s disappearance – and three weeks after the birth of my own daughter – that Margaret Marques disappeared.  She was kidnapped, molested and murdered by a store clerk who is, God willing, the bitch of a very lonely sadist in prison.  The Minneapolis Police did a capable job of catching the scumbag; but the eight year old daughter of immigrants passed from the news fairly quickly.

This isn’t to take anything away from the work the Wetterling foundation has done and still does, to minimize or politicize their tragic loss – Joe Soucheray is right, we do owe the Wetterlings something – or to wish anything but a very very different background had befallen Jacob and his family.

But would the family have gotten the kind of leverage they did if they were just a regular bunch of central Minnesota schlubs?

6 thoughts on “The Right Profile

  1. Ditto BB’s question.
    I know that the Democrat ran her against Bachmann in their bi-annual attempt in the 6th to imitate the GOP’s quixotic effort in the 4th and the 5th a few years back.
    But the larger point – that only the connected seem to get action is probably one of the top themes of the current election.
    PS: The cashiers window at the Clinton Foundation is closing. If you anticipate needing government fav… er, uh, constituent service in 2017-2020, get your payment in now. That’s especially true for you foreigners.

  2. This is frustrating and embarrassing. My Google-Fu generally is pretty good but the stuff I’m searching for either isn’t on the web, or it’s buried under mountains of more recent stories about catching the killer.

    I lived in Central Minnesota when Jacob went missing. My recollection is Wetterlings were connected to the Stearns County DFL and everybody knew it, which was the reason why Governor Perpich made a personal visit to their home and took the unprecedented step of calling out the National Guard to hunt for their kid.

    But if it was true, I can’t prove it anymore. FACT CHECK: case not proven.

    Since I can’t provide a link to show the reason Jerry and Patty Wetterling got special treatment political; therefore, I retract the charge. I apologize to Mitch for putting him in an awkward situation and to SITD readers for claiming something was True when it’s technically only Possible (although I believe sincerely that it’s More Likely Than Not).

    .

  3. Well, as president of the local NAACP, I’m sure Jerry Wetterling would have been likely to have voted DFL. It’s not for no reason that Rush jokes that it’s the NAA(L)CP, after all.

    (and I wasn’t trying to cause problems, I was just curious….well done, Joe, in your comment)

  4. No, it was a good call, Bikebubba. One of the things SITDers pride ourselves on is sticking to the objective, provable Truth unless we’re clearly stating an opinion. That’s what makes us different from – and better than – the competition. I’m not annoyed at being held to my own standards, I’m annoyed at my own inability to filter out the kludge to find the nugget, if the nugget is even out there and not merely something I imagined.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.