Gregg Easterbrook express some sympathy for Michael Vick:

There’s something deeply sick about the fact that you can go to the NFL’s official shop and order a Bills jersey with No. 32 and SIMPSON on the back — go here and try it yourself — or a Panthers jersey with CARRUTH on the back, the NFL system actually says “Great choice!” in response, but if you go here and try to order a Falcons’ jersey with Vick’s name or number, you’ll get a message saying your order cannot be processed.

…

Vick has no serious prior offenses and does not stand accused of any act of violence against a person. He grew up poor in the crime-and-drugs plagued Ridley Circle housing project of Newport News, Va., yet unlike many around him there did not succomb to the temptation of lawbreaking. If Vick goes to jail and loses his NFL career for a first offense of cruelty to animals and gambling, while [Ray] Lewis essentially got off scot-free for watching two human beings stabbed to death, that wouldn’t be “sending a message.” That would be a travesty of justice.

I must say, knowing the racial overtones of this phrase, that there is a whiff of a lynch mob in the anti-Vick screamers. Yes, what he is alleged to have done is terrible, but there’s an irony in PETA, of all people, claming the moral high ground. And having lived in a city that cheered the murder-watching Ray Lewis and the drug-dealing Jamal Lewis, I’m inclined to have a modicum of perspective.

And considering that our own cultural history includes this and this and various public brutal forms of this; considering that a vast swath of the American public thinks this and this are appropriate to treat human beings, we should be a little humbler before we brand someone as a violent psychopath.

Let’s condemn Michael Vick, yes. But let’s not get too far up that high horse.