Our squishy elite and the Moussaoui verdict

I agree with Moussaoui ("America, you lost!"), Charles Krauthammer (who said the Moussaoui trial regardless of the outcome demonstrated the complete failure of the US justice system as a forum for terrorist trials) and Peggy Noonan (who said the jury should have voted for him to die). This is the most important part of Noonan's column that Wongdoer quoted (see about 2-4 posts lower):

This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. [such considerations go to the question of guilt or lack thereof -- TKM] They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs [mitigation factors for death penalty sentencing -- TKM].
As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.

Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.

I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.

And therein lies the danger. Europe is a continent whose political culture throughout (except occasionally in Britain) is exemplified by the self-annointed intelligentsia that is anti-American, anti-Semitic, self-indulgent, welfare-statist and filled with the sociological mythos of what a wonderful world this would be if the world could be as one. It's the Imagine generation inscribing John Lennon's vapid ideals onto the political culture of the continent of Enlightenment.

And the oceans have not prevented those intellectual weeds from taking root in the US.