“The evil that men do lives after them,” according to William Shakespeare. But I now believe that the evil men do is far greater than even a mystery writer can imagine or a police detective can ever prove.

Yesterday I was bludgeoned with more evil than I had ever imagined. The blunt force trauma I received was my own fault: I spend much too much time following high-profile trials and watching TV “magazine shows” like Glenn Beck.

Freud pointed out the need for human beings to pass on bad news. That’s what I’m about to do in this blog. In fact, now that I think about it, that’s all I’ve ever done in this blog—try to get bad news off my chest.

Glenn Beck’s program yesterday focused on slavery in the Arab world—in the place where the United States has for decades expended its treasure and blood. Specifically, Beck reported on advocates of slavery in Kuwait and Egypt. For instance, he played a videotape of a Kuwaiti woman who thought the Moslem world should import women and children from Chechnya, where they are taken as prisoners of war, for use as sex slaves.

But to make matters worse, I learned after the program that it isn’t only Islamists in the Middle East who advocate slavery; the fact is that slavery is practiced, even in pro-Western, secular countries. In Libya, for instance, before Qaddafi, under King Idris, slavery was openly practiced—even Americans who lived and worked on American military bases in Tripoli knew about slaves there. In other words, the U. S. government, including the Department of Defense and the Department of State, have an ongoing policy of propping up regimes that tolerate slavery.

Yesterday’s testimony by Casey Anthony’s mother was another evil spectacle I witnessed yesterday. Cindy Anthony was so drugged up she couldn’t even remember the events she was supposed to be testifying about. I can understand why the courts permit defendants to take drugs to remain calm, but I cannot accept a court system in which witnesses for the prosecution are permitted to take the stand on drugs.