Dammit! I so wasn’t going to mention Santa on the Interweb today. And I was never going to mention the two of them in the same headline.
But when our giddily pro-death-pentalty president pardons 19 people on Death Row — including, bizarrely, a Montana man who poisoned three bald eagles and a gangsta rapper who was caught with 1.4m of liquid cocaine (and cowrote the Fugees album The Score).
It’s sad that, in addition to this star-spangled list of newfound national patriots, there’s someone who sounds worthwhile and actually deserving of praise — Charles Winters, a Miami businessman who helped transfer two B-17 aircraft to Israel to aid in the War of Independence, even flying one of the planes himself from Miami to Czechoslovakia. His son only knew the reason for his father’s imprisonment after his death:
“I’m overwhelmed,” Jim Winters, a Miami maker of artistic neon signs, said in a telephone interview. “It happened 16 years before I was born. He went to jail and he didn’t want his kids to know. He was old-school and proud.”
