A message from Sheriff Taylor...

...for the Bush Administration and the sheep who've knuckled under to them on issues of privacy, engaging in the cowardly rhetoric of a "post-9/11" era and in what I can only refer to as moral relativism. I'm tempted to run the screen here, but will instead direct you to Tony Collett's post.

It was wrong to do then and it's wrong to do now. Thanks for the voice of reason across three decades, Andy.

Certainly, some will point out that in the clip the conversation in question is referred to as one between client and lawyer, but in an age when we have an administration that has set up "legal" proceedings wherein the accused doesn't even necessarily have a right to details of the evidence against them, I doubt the distinction is keeping some in this administration awake at night.

I wonder how much this was a shot at the Hoover era of the FBI at the time?

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey, Miraclo: I don't have speakers here at work, and no net at home.

Is there a transcript of the clip available somewhere?

Sorry to bother you. -- grey_zealot
Mike Norton said…
The gist of it is that Opie's excited because he and a friend used a tape recorder to bug a guy's cell, and it caught information that will presumably incriminate him. As soon as Andy hears this (what Opie's saying) he takes the tape recorder, admonishes Opie for not remembering what he told him about evesdropping, and proceeds to erase the tape.

Opie makes a plea that it's an exception in favor of the law, and Andy tells him the law can't use that kind of help, and reiterates that he cannot listen to whatever was on the tape.

Towards the end Andy underscores it as a conversation between someone in custody and his lawyer, which narrows the field a little and muddies the water somewhat -- suddenly we're not sure if he'd be as adamant if it were just two people talking, though the earlier statements lead me to believe that wouldn't have made much difference to him. Along the way he refers to the right of privacy as one of our most sacred rights.
Doc Nebula said…
Having watched this again over at Tony's blog, I was amazed to find that I dimly remember seeing this when I was very young... probably while I was staying with one of my great aunts who used to love to watch Sheriff Andy. And I also dimly recall being outraged at Andy's display of impractical ethics -- it struck me, at that tender age (I doubt I was more than 10) that such principles were utterly ridiculous; these were criminals and they had to be jailed! Who cared how you got the evidence, if the evidence itself irrefutably showed guilt?

It's certainly the response of a 10 year old, and I've since outgrown it, as I've come to understand that, indeed, how you get to the desired result is as important as achieving the result itself.

But it's interesting to me to realize that many 'adult' conservatives, including those currently running our country, have never outgrown this pre-adolesecent, entirely emotional outrage at the concept of allowing impractical principles and high falutin', ivory tower morals to interfere with, you know, Beating the Bad Guys.

Which is the conservative movement in a nutshell -- infantile emotionalism rationalizing every urgent desire with either patriotism or religion, or both. You have to attain a reasonably adult perspective to realize that, yeah, even if Batman IS always right, he probably still shouldn't be allowed to run around in a hood beating the crap out of everyone he doesn't like... and while I can get behind that essential childishness in a comic book, it's a much more serious matter when we're talking about real people with real badges in real life.

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