And some more on Nantkes

The other day I was listening to Drive-Time Lincoln, the local news show on KILN, the area source for Limbaugh, Hannity, Drudge, and other such clowns. Drive-time is hosted by one Coby Mach, I can't trust a name like that, sounds Texan, fucking short-dicked psychopaths.

In fairness, Mach isn't as much of a jackass as the nationally syndicated assholes we all know and love. This is probably a matter of necessity. It's one thing to excoriate faceless baby-eating liberals from some far away Sodom that good heartlanders will never go to, but it's quite another thing to demonize the next-door neighbor with a Nebraskans for Peace bumper sticker whose kid plays on the same soccer team as yours.

But though he's a second rate thug, Mach is, after all, the host of an AM talk radio show, so the bullshit, delivered with a smirk instead of a growl, is still reliably delivered.

And so it was on Thursday, when Mock tried to put a populist spin on my belladonna Danielle Nantkes's recent drunk-driving incident. Nantkes, you see, wasn't technically arrested, as state senators are immune from being arrested for misdemeanors when the Unicam is in session. She was taken to a detox center and walked out the next morning to her well-earned De'leon's breakfast without having to pay bail or face a judge.

Mach, in his own congenially outraged way, wanted to know why Nantkes didn't face the same righteous punishment that common drunkards do.

Well, it's because of the English revolution, Coby. It's because Charles the 1st tried to use his soldiers to get Oliver Cromwell and his partisans out of his hair. It didn't work, and Cromwell eventually succeeded in beheading Charles and installing his own highly amusing Puritan theocracy.

After the English unrest settled down, Parliament saw this incident of how the executive could use the legal authorities (who are his employees) after all, to remove political opponents in the legislature for any number of crimes real or imagined. So they forbade the King from having MP's arrested while the house was in session. This prohibition was passed on to the American constitution, and the constitutions for all fifty states.

A local lawyer explained this to Mach on the air, in slightly less detail, killing any further rant he had to make on the matter. But local news shorts on KILN still question the fairness of Nantkes's non-arrest at any opportunity. this is bound to mislead the typical AM radio listener, whose knowledge of history is restricted to vague remembrances of American supermen kicking foreign ass and dirty hippies complaining about it.

Of course, there is also the small fact that my neighborhood would have no voice in state government if it's state senator is in jail, but then we don't represent the real common sense people who listen to KILN and our outraged that Lincoln refuses to turn itself into an extension of West Omaha. With Mayor Seng on her way out, expect Nantkes to become the new local Streisand.