The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, and the skillful direct it. ~~Jeane Platiere

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Here are a pair of recent opinion pieces—which, with admitted bias, I have deemed “good” and “bad”—on the topic of Lynne Stewart’s sentencing last week…

GOOD OP (from Mike Whitney on The Smirking Chimp):

Hey, At Least We Got Lynne Stewart Off the Streets

So far, Bush’s only triumph in his muddled war on terror has been locking up the two Stewart Sisters, Lynne and Martha. (They’re not really sisters) Neither posed any threat to national security, but that’s beside the point. Their arrest sends a strong message to “home-decoration mavens� and 67 year old cancer patients that they’d better “watch their step� or they’ll find themselves in prison-pinstripes.

Do Americans really see how crazy this is or have we been so subsumed in “terror-hysteria� that we’ve lost our sense of humor altogether?

Consider this: while attorney Stewart is tottering off to prison for defending a “blind Sheik�, a tan and rested Bin Laden is somewhere in the Pakistan-outback working on golf swing and his memoirs?

Does that make any sense?

Only if the real objective is to intimidate lawyers who defend unpopular clients rather than nailing terrorists.

Bush’s contempt for leftists far exceeds his dubious desire to rid the world of terrorism. That’s why the country’s energies are so misdirected and doomed to failure. [full text]

BAD OP (from Ann Coulter on Townhall.com):

O.J. trials for terrorists

The Democrats claim they want to treat terrorism as a criminal law problem, but when we give them an American citizen convicted of aiding terrorists — as happened this week — a Democrat judge gives her a slap on the wrist. Or he was going to give her a wrist slap until someone told him that wrist-slapping was banned under the Geneva Conventions, so he let the wrist off with a warning.

Last year, a New York jury found Lynne Stewart guilty of helping her former client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, communicate with his Egyptian-based group of murderous terrorists, appropriately known as “the Islamic Group.”

The blind sheik needed to instruct his followers to abandon a truce and resume murdering innocents, but he couldn’t get the message through because, by sheer coincidence, he was in prison for conspiring to murder innocents here in America by plotting the first World Trade Center bombing. So Stewart and a “translator” met with her former client in prison and took his messages for transmission to his followers in Egypt.

With the full constitutional protections Democrats want for terrorists in Guantanamo, Stewart was convicted by a New York jury last year.

This week, Judge John Koeltl — appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1994 — spurned the prosecution’s request for a 30-year sentence and gave Stewart 28 months for being a terrorist’s mule. Now she’ll clog up the criminal justice system with endless appeals for the next several years — using procedures that liberals also want for Guantanamo detainees. [full text]