So Janet Reno has shuffled off this mortal coil.  She will always be known to me as Janet Sterno, ever since she presided over the immolation of all those people and kids in Waco.  I won't be shedding any tears over Ms. Sterno's having – as Rush Limbaugh likes to say – "attained room temperature," especially when I think of what the "room temperature" must have been in the Branch Davidians' last moments, as they were burnt to a crisp by firebombs ordered and deployed by their own federal government.

And I certainly wouldn’t wish Parkinson’s Disease as a cause of death on anyone; my own dad died from complications of Parkinson’s, and since I’m only ten years younger than Ms. Sterno, I may – God forbid! – have to face that myself.  But it’s still hard for me to muster any actual sadness at her passing.

I’m thinking of one tactic that Ms. Sterno used over and over to justify her actions.  She apparently believed that if one were suspected of exercising one’s rights under the Second Amendment, that precluded one’s rights under the Fourth Amendment!  So the warrants she issued to break into the home where Elian Gonzalez was being sheltered and the Branch Davidian compound were based on the supposition that (horrors!) there might be guns on the premises; whether such guns were legally possessed or otherwise was apparently not deemed relevant.

Another tactic she employed, from the time she was Florida’s first female state attorney, was to justify searches and seizures on the grounds that, whenever children might be present within the subject premises, child abuse was “suspected” of occurring, even if the only allegations of such “abuse” came from her own office.  As I recall, this tactic was employed in the Elian Gonzalez affair also.

And, speaking of Elian Gonzalez, if you desire proof of how effective Communist brainwashing can be, and of the truth of Vladimir Lenin’s remark, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted” (which is why the left has worked so hard to effectively control the U.S. educational establishment and thus the indoctrination of children), see the story of Elian Gonzalez and how “content” he is in Cuba nowadays.

So, sorry, Janet: while almost any person's death is a tragedy, I have to lump my feelings about your demise in with my feelings about the death of, say, Yasser Arafat.  I'm not exactly sitting shiva or caterwauling over your grave.

Stu Tarlowe has contributed well over 100 pieces to American Thinker.  His personal pantheon of heroes and role models includes Barry Farber, Jean Shepherd, Long John Nebel, Aristide Bruant, Col. Jeff Cooper, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and G. Gordon Liddy.