Look, BT, I've been around. And while I'm perfectly willing to cut a break for some underprivileged ghetto youth who's spent his entire formative years on the shitty end of the stick and never really had a chance, I DO NOT place a Nazi war criminal, the son of a well-to-do professional couple and a certified architect, or Albert Gore, the son and grandson of senators, to be in that same category. They had every opportunity and yet they chose freely to follow dishonourable paths, in Speer's case, a path which his own father knew to be wrong. Thurmond was as bad as any of them, his protection of lynch mobs by attempting to shield them from the course of justice was nothing more than open incitement, and he did not grow up in poverty or disadvantaged, at the shitty end of any stick.
Soft-hearted liberal tolerance of these examples of pure evil (or in Gore's case, of sordid hypocrisy) is a curse on the values of a nation and one reason for the current abominable state of national morality, where the prosecution of torturers (a treaty obligation!) is waived by a law professor on the grounds that it would be "looking backward." Your mushy ethics aren't doing anybody any favours.
