A Murder in Brno

In a suburb of Brno, a 20-year-old guy from California snapped and killed a family of four; he was related to them, and had been staying with them for a couple weeks. The father and one of the sons played in the "Ukulele Orchestra Jako Brno," a local band. He didn't have a gun, though police reports indicate that he was "armed," and details aren't clear how he killed them. Witnesses reported a fire in the house they were living in, and in the course of putting out the fire discovered the bodies. 

Apparently he escaped to Vienna and took a flight to DC, but the cops there were waiting for him. 

The mayor of Ivanovice, in which the murders took place aptly described the murders as a "tragedy." The family was by all accounts a normal, pleasant family, and were well-known in their community, playing in the band and riding choppers. 

The Czech Ministry of Justice has already began calling for extradition arrangements for the alleged murderer, Kevin Dahlgren, to be tried for the murders. 

This is part of the blog post I'm supposed to add some sort of insightful commentary, or analysis, or something like that. But I can't really figure any of it out. Why does a guy come halfway around the world to meet up with his distant cousins and then just kill them, and do it in a way that would almost certainly get him caught immediately? He spoke no Czech, there's no indications what he was doing here (some rumors surfaced that he was here to be an English teacher), and he killed the people who were hosting him. And it's frustrating to sit and try to come up with whys when sometimes, there just aren't any.

The Hockey Games Thursday

So I was busy Thursday, teaching English, and I heard that sometime as the day unfolded the US beat the Russians 8-3 in the quarterfinals of the IIHF World Championships, which is kind of a big deal here in Česko. It turns out that this particular time youth and talent beat out age and experience, or something like that. In any case, USA!, USA!, USA! and "On to Switzerland."

But because I was working, I didn't actually get to see any of the games Thusrday, except for that of the mighty underdogs the Slovaks, against the eeeeevil Finns. The game got just a little rough in the second period, when the Slovaks were down 3-0 (in Helsinki!) and were trying to reassert themselves.

Well, it turned out that a couple of times, a Slovak and a Finn were both recommended to the penalty box to reconsider their opinions about roughing each other. This started a somewhat lively debate in the local bar in Brno about culpability, reciprocity, self-defense, and other topics in regards to justice, with various Slovak barristers plying their case, supported by inexpensive beer and extensive film evidence. (For some reason, the particular court of public opinion in which your correspondent observed the trial was strangely bereft of Finnish counsel.)

After evidence provided by numerous instant replays was presented by the Slovak side documenting that a certain player with a blue jersey and a shield of the Triglav was simply "protecting" his goalkeeper from a nefarious white-shirted man with peculiar Finno-Ugric markings on his clothing, one rather naive witness pointed out that, quote, "hypothetically, according to the rules," the man in blue needn't have punched the aggressor multiple times in the face and the head because resisting would have uncertainly led to a better resolution of their differences, and indeed, the referee would have given Slovakia a 2-minute power play, instead of a 4-4 situation.

To this, the chief advocate of the Slovak side said, "yes, hypotheticals are very interesting. But this is hockey, in real life. If you completely wait for the rules to be enforced, you'll get your #$%( kicked first. Then you'll be right, but you'll also be injured and possibly unable to continue."

It was with this observation in mind when I read Peggy Noonan's most recent column. Noonan asserts that "Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again."

However, I can't help but feeling that we're already way past that point. As Mark Steyn pointed out, one of the main problems is that the federal government is already too involved with our daily lives. In our hockey metaphor, an independent counsel might act as a referee, but his abilities would be so circumscribed that there would be little to convince Democrats to cooperate with an investigation. Moreover, many of those who have the ultimate ability to sanction the Democrats – the voters – are unwilling to do so, and indeed, many of them welcome this politicization of the IRS. The polarization of the country has given the Democrats their partisans, just as surely as it has made GOP activists less trusting of Democrats.

Is using the IRS to intimidate your political opponents a crime? Yes. Does President Obama care about any possible sanctions? No. He is like the Finn who knows that both he and his opponent will pay equally, so it makes sense to get in as many blows as possible, and get the better of his opponent at the outset.

The only solution is to reduce the power of the IRS tout court. Prosecute, yes, but the GOP must also remember that while this addresses this particular incident, the festering, underlying problem of a government that has simply gotten too large will remain. Give Obama his two minutes in the penalty box, but remember that the game is not won there. We're still down by a couple goals, and the clock is ticking, and we're shorthanded until 2014 at the least. In the end, the Finns won 4-3.