Jenkins: "Would you want to go before that court?"

Even the most casual of sports fans surely held an opinion about Lance Armstrong, just as they did in baseball with Barry Bonds. I remain firmly within the Armstrong camp in spite of recent developments, primarily because of the hypocrisy surrounding concepts like "cheating" (you mean to tell me that so many individuals and institutions venerated by Americans do NOT lie, cheat and steal?), but that particular discussion can be saved for another day.

For now, one can scour the Web for testimonials for and against Armstrong, and find just the right one to mirror personal points of view.

I merely offer this one by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post, which asks us to consider the point at which the odiousness of the policing transcends the villainy of the crime.

Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADA’s hypocrisy

... Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time I’ve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these “doping” investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. It’s the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletes’ antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.