Let her rot.
Charismatic terror monger Lynne Stewart is no beauty. But she is a great actress.
The lady ex-lawyer who loves terrorists too much lumbered into the Manhattan federal courtroom in 2006, all 200-plus pounds of fire-breathing radical. But the Stewart who stood before dim-witted Manhattan federal Judge John Koeltl took pains to look pathetic.
“The end of my career truly is like a sword in my side,” Stewart, in girlish tears, told the judge. “I don’t want to be in prison. I don’t believe I need to be in prison. I believe I still have contributions to make to society.”
Her lawyers said — are you ready? — Stewart was too fat for the lockup.
Lawyer Elizabeth Fink said her obese client’s breast cancer was sure to return in a place where women are denied the dignity of wearing bras.
“If you send her to prison, she is going to die,” Fink intoned.
We should be so lucky.
More than three years later, Stewart, who may be responsible for untold deaths here and in Egypt, is a perky senior of 70. She’s alive and well.
And laughing at you.
Because minutes after her three-hanky performance, seconds after the adoring Koeltl sentenced Stewart to a paltry 28 months in prison, not the 30 years she deserved, she made a remarkable transformation.
Before our eyes, Stewart changed from large, ailing old lady into a crafty, manipulative dame.
“People are clamoring for a party!” were the first words she bleated, as she bounded out of the courtroom like a teenager on meth. She slung an arm around my shoulders. I felt a chill.
“I am back out and I’m staying out until an appeal that I hope will vindicate me — and that I hope will make me back into the lawyer I was!” the disbarred attorney cried. She laughed contemptuously at her puny sentence.
“I can do that standing on my head!”
In a rare stroke of legal common sense this week, an appeals court not only upheld Stewart’s conviction, it determined that the judge must sentence her again — to determine if Stewart committed perjury at trial. Hopefully, she’ll be going away for much longer than she thought.
Stewart is no innocent naif. So zealously did she represent 1993 World Trade Center plotter Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, she passed dangerous messages of death between him and his followers outside the prison where he was held.
Stewart is seen on a surveillance tape rattling a water pitcher and tapping a table — making “cover noises” so that an accomplice’s conversation with the blind sheik could not be overheard.
Investigators found a chilling draft of the sheik’s fatwa in Stewart’s law office that called on Muslims to slay Americans. Children, too. Osama bin Laden said it inspired him.
Stewart’s love for all forms of terrorism was no secret.
“I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence,” she testified at trial.
This lady got into bed with terrorists. For some reason known only to God, the judge took the rogue’s side. Now he has a second chance. Don’t mess up the sentencing this time, judge.
I’ll feel a lot safer with Stewart locked up during the coming trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and friends, idiotically set to take place in Manhattan. But there is little chance now that Stewart will participate in his defense.
Lynne Stewart can slither back into the hole she dug.
What the @#$% do palin’s foes mean?
You go, Sarah.
Sarah Palin (above, with son Trigg) is a joke, right? So why are the Democrats so obsessed with killing her off?
Palin-bashing from the likes of TV pundits and David Letterman has hit the airwaves during the publicity tour for the ex-veep candidate’s memoir, “Going Rogue.” Lefty nitwit Naomi Wolf even declared, breathlessly and seriously, to Larry King that Palin was “carrying water for policies of [Karl] Rove and [Dick] Cheney and [George W.] Bush, including policies on torture.
“History has seen plenty of examples of a cabal — a group of people who get into power. And then she is a telegenic, charming, Evita-type front-person to kind of lure the masses . . .” Mmmkay. Sounds powerful.
Al Gore’s Current TV broadcast an obscene cartoon that referred to Palin as a “TWILF.” Get your mind out of the gutter, people. Current TV suggested, unconvincingly, that TWILF stands for “Tweep (Twitter aficionado) I’d Like to Follow.” Well, my fifth-grader knows what the “F” stands for, though I wish she didn’t.
The Palin overkill is making her stronger. And that is the way the VPILF likes it.
Protesters too much
Bruce Springsteen sang. Jerry Seinfeld joked. But former NBC/Universal CEO Bob Wright had harsh words for protesters who tried to muck up the A-list benefit concert he put on at Carnegie Hall on behalf of autistic kids.
“The protesters are lucky,” said Wright. “They’re well off enough, healthy enough, to do it. I wish my grandson were able to join them.”
Wright runs Autism Speaks, which has raised over $200 million for research into a disorder that afflicts mainly children.
That didn’t stop a clutch of sign-carrying adult protesters from descending on Carnegie Hall Tuesday night, trying to disrupt a concert attended by Donald Trump, Howard Stern and Martha Stewart. Protesters complain that there’s not one autistic person on the board of the org, which produced an “offensive” ad suggesting that autism was a fate worse than death.
Wright, whose grandson cannot talk because of autism, said the disorder is exploding among young kids who can’t speak for themselves.
“This is serious business,” he said.
Give this worthy group a chance.
Even Lazio beats pathetic Paterson
Hang it up, gov.
Gov. Pipsqueak can hear the fat lady singing — but he’s too proud, stubborn or stupid to listen.
After Gov. Paterson huffed and puffed and fought an uphill battle to get the state Senate to care about cutting the state’s tottering budget, after he issued a flip-flop on holding a terror trial in Manhattan (he was for it before he was against it), comes a Siena Research Institute poll that shows Republican Rick Laziobeats him in the race for governor.
That’s the Lazio who was trounced by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2000 Senate race. The same Lazio who humiliated Paterson this week by issuing a snarky open letter telling front-running Dem candidate Andrew Cuomo to stop picking on the poor, wittle governor!
And you thought President Obama killed him by suggesting Paterson not run again. How much of a public spanking can one man endure before he throws in the towel?