That was my thought process. But she obviously thinks so highly of herself that she can stand up to the American public and defend her position, even though things obviously went sideways.
Wait, because she stands by principals rather than the whims of the public, we DON'T want her in office?
9/11 happens: people panic and demand action. School shooting happens: people panic and demand action. I want a leader who DOESN'T succumb to the panic.
I only say that because, in my view, it is more important to understand what the principles ARE that a person stands for than to support someone for standing by them.
A lot of people have stood on principle. From George Washington to MLK. From Castro to Pinochet. From John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis to Pinkerton and Harriet Tubman. We cannot support them all. As Lincoln said, "...both MAY be, but one MUST be wrong..."
It's the principle that makes a person worthy of your support, not that the person stands by it.
I would argue both are necessary... though I may not agree with someone standing by their principles, I at least have a better chance of respecting the person. I also acknowledge that personal experience can change one's opinion... but those politicians that flop week to week sicken me.
I'll give you 9/11 and Connecticut, but this is different. This woman has ZERO principle or sense of morality. No one is panicking over the death of Aaron Swartz, but many are angry. Angry over overreach that is (finally) getting some attention. The furor over Ortiz is mainly due to her relentless pursuit of a poor boy who was suffering depression and also facing many felony charges that he would be stuck with for the rest of his life. That is why people are angry. The root cause is BECAUSE of the government, not because the government itself failed to act.
The leaders are not succumbing to panic. The "leaders" (whom I should actually call "rulers," because one day they decided they should rule instead of lead) are succumbing to their own mistakes that the American public is now waking up to and demanding action.
I get the core of your argument but we put humans in these positions of power because we believe they are able to use a non-scripted judgement in determining which cases deserve attention.
On a broader note I believe the way the law was written is worse than what Oritz did - but she was in fact trying to hand-chop an apple thief in order to make an example. The decision to go after Swartz and to pursue a high (the maximum?) penalty was clearly wrong and she deserves all the public scrutiny directed at her office.
Prosecutors enjoy a broad array of tools to do their job. It is up to them to use these tools sensibly or risk Congress taking them away.
AG Ortiz needs to go not only for the prosecutorial bullying but also because she was dumb enough to expose how these tools are abused by prosecutors around the country.
Smart politicians will get rid of her soon, they don't want to risk this to grow to the point Congress needs to actually do something about it.
In the second case I don't see it so much as people panicking and demanding action; more like people saying "I told you so, now will you do something about this?"
But anyway, yeah I'd like my public officials to recognize when they are wrong and to adjust their behavior. If her principles make her bully defendants and she wont adjust, yeah, I don't want her in office.
The people saying "I told you so" are wrong. School shootings hardly ever happen, maybe 3-4 times per year in the whole nation. There's statistically no way to tell if they're going up or down; it's just noise.
If 3-4 per year are too many, why do we ignore that thousands of gang-related shootings that occur each year? That is not background noise, it is the bulk of homicide in this country and despite a recent reduction, we still see thousands of shootings each year (and tens of thousands of murders with other weapons).
The real problem with the response to the Newtown shooting is not the call for gun control, but that the call focuses almost exclusively on guns that are rarely used in crime: rifles. The Newtown shooter had two handguns, and just a few days before the shooting, a handgun was used to murder a man, in broad daylight, on a New York City street. So on the one hand, you have the exceedingly rare case of a lunatic shooting children using a rifle, and on the other you have the exceedingly (and unfortunately) common case of a criminal shooting someone with a handgun. Which of these sounds like a more urgent issue to you?
For what it's worth, handguns are a target for thieves. After a newspaper published a map of handgun owners in New York, there were at least three cases of houses being burglarized with a clear goal of stealing a handgun. Criminals buy handguns on the black market; they are not buying rifles on the black market, and even when they do buy rifles, they rarely use them because it is too hard to hide such a large weapon. Despite the media's mischaracterization of the Newtown shooter's rifle as a "high-power military-grade weapon," it is the less powerful cartridges like .22lr and 9mm Parabellum that are commonly used to kill.
The panic over, "It looks scary and some lunatic killed people with it," is nothing but a distraction from the real problem we face in America. If we can only muster enough political strength to make stricter regulations on a single class of firearm, we should tighten the restrictions on the handguns, which people strangely find to be less "scary" (nevermind that it is deadly, right?) and bizarrely enough want to distance themselves from regulating (after all, by restricting guns, we don't want to restrict the right to defend one's home with force -- unless you are using a scary-looking gun to do it).
Let's be reasonable about this: we have a real problem, and a not-so-real problem. Let's address the real problem first.
Two questions, which are also applicable to the actual topic of the thread: 1. How much time and effort are you willing to spend to prevent those 3-4 rare incidents? 2. How do you know if the measures you take have any effect? If there is only 1 school shooting in the next year, that's not statistically saying anything. It's equally possible that you just got lucky that year.
Almost anything happening 3-4 times per year is acceptable. It's so rare, that almost any other cause of death is more likely. For example, you should be several orders of magnitude more concerned about children dying from the flu than about them getting killed in a school shooting.
If the status quo is misguided complacency towards flawed conditions, isn't it positive to react to a dramatic and traumatic event that puts a spotlight on how broken the current system is?
This is not someone we want in a higher office.