The Gall of it All: GREAT Op-Ed on Vick in Washington Post

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/21/AR2007082102093.html?hpid=topnews

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Michael Vick and his alter ego Ron Mexico, those suave fakers, are going away. It looks like Vick will do at least 12 to 18 months in a federal penitentiary for his crimes, after which the admittedly faint hope is that he might emerge a more whole and gentle person, as opposed to a dog slayer and liar. In the meantime, Vick's lawyer wants us to remember, "Michael is a father, he's a son, he's a human being -- people oftentimes forget that." Pardon, but if anybody forgot his humanity, it was Vick. Not us.

It's hard to sort out the high emotions Vick's dogfighting case provoke, the various hues of anger. It's all confused outrage. How could an athlete so bedazzling also be so brutal? Why would Vick, the fortune-kissed, hundred-million-dollar quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, wallow in the gore of illegal dogfighting by choice? Why would anyone ruin animals except out of sheer, dumb meanness? How could Vick, a man with quite glaring weaknesses and a competitor who has himself struggled, punish dogs with death for their failures?

There are those who say Vick should suffer the same tortures those dogs suffered, or at the least his sentence should resemble something in a scene from "Cool Hand Luke": He should be fitted for manacles, and forced to break rocks with a shovel all day in the hot sun. And then there are those milder sorts who think the outrage at Vick is misplaced, who wonder why, as my friend Gene Robinson put it, some people are so furious over the barbaric treatment of dogs, and yet seem to "accept without outrage shameful levels of human carnage."

But outrage at Vick is not misplaced. It may be inarticulate and bewildered, but it's exactly right. There are myriad reasons to feel it, the most minor of which is the fact that Vick is a deceiver. He played the innocent, while hanging with lowlifes. He opened a wine bar on one front and ran an illicit dogfighting operation in secret. He swore he was the ignorant victim of a bad childhood and misplaced loyalties, used by his old friends from the ghetto in Newport News, when in fact he was a ringleader.</snip>