They're At It Again In South Dakota . . .

William "Wild Bill" Janklow, the former South Dakota governor and congressman who was nailed for manslaughter after he ran over a motorcyclist in his Cadillac in 2003, has gotten a go-free card with the erasure of the conviction.

After his trial, Janklow was sentenced to 100 days in jail,but the sentence was suspended and he was told that his record would be erased in 2007 if he didn’t cause any more mayhem. At "sentencing," the judge declared that Janklow had suffered enough by having to give up his congressional seat.

Steve Hendricks puts this farce into perspective at Jesus' General:

"The Dakota press, which over the years had ignored the hundreds of speeding and reckless-driving tickets that Wild Bill racked up, thought the punishment Solomonic. No surprise that newsrooms offered not a bleat of critique when Janklow’s record was scrubbed last week.

"The manslaughter was covered at all only because it had to be. A dead cyclist at a public crossroads is hard to ignore. Not so Janklow’s other, often legal crimes. Three decades back, Janklow was the George Wallace of Indian Country, a onetime hayseed who rode his state’s racist winds to power, then used that power to fan the gusts of anti-Indian prejudice into prairie gales. He did so unchallenged by a cowardly Fourth Estate—yellow journalism indeed. The difference between Dakota and Dixie is that George Wallace, Orville Faubus, Bull Connor, and other mastodons of Jim Crow were eventually speared and fossilized. Janklow endured, the stegosaurus in the state’s living room. Given the choice of appeasing the grocers and car dealers who peopled their display ads or lending a voice to the Plains Indians who had been raped for a century, the newsmen of Rapid City and Sioux Falls always sided with its fellow burghers. May the memories of fat ad accounts be cool comfort in hell."