[little jeremiah]

Not punishing criminals sets a precendent for everyone else. Fish rots from head down. It sets the atmosphere that if the big guys can commit egregious felonies and get away with it, then why can't everyone else. The country becomes "Rule of Man" not "Rule of Law". If one is a big enough man, one can get away with murder, figuratively and literally.

This is dead wrong, It poisons the social order. Someone else said it better than I can:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

[LS]

I get it.

Then there is reality. I might just not be possible.

Like Lee thinking he could take the center of Meade’s line at Gettysburg.