Two videos, both worth watching.

This one is frankly a little hard to watch:

This one is easier and should be watched over and over again:

Different context, obviously, but I think the basic sentiment applies: When are we going to say we have finally had enough? Hey, here's a suggestion – how about when it's become "standard operating procedure" for the government to put its hands in a six-year-old girl's pants? (If you couldn't watch the whole first video, that happens.) That seems like it should be a pretty good line in the sand, doesn't it?

In any other context, if you saw a stranger doing that to a six-year-old girl, wouldn't you kick that person's ass? Wouldn't you at least try? Even at some risk to yourself? I bet you would. So why do we walk by when the government does it? Have we really become such cowards that we are willing to put up with six-year-old girls being groped because we think otherwise we can't be 99.999% safe?

Both the right and the left are properly pissed off about this. So when do we collectively have our Joe Welch moment?

Let me try to add a little humor to this, since this is a legal-humor blog: in reading about Joseph Welch just now, I learned for the first time that he finally snapped and went off on McCarthy, beginning the end of that particular national nightmare, after McCarthy started attacking Fred Fisher. At the time, Welch was a partner at Hale & Dorr (now WilmerHale), and Fisher was one of his associates.

And you thought partners didn't care.

I mean, for God's sake, if a partner in a law firm will stick up for an associate when the stakes are that high, can't we all do the same at least for the six-year-old girls of America? Can we please get our dignity back? At long last?

Update: There are several versions of the Joe Welch video on YouTube – the full version is six minutes or so but is well worth watching. This one is four minutes, and includes the almost-as-important thunderous applause that broke out in the hearing room after he was finished. (Also a few good shots of the associate sitting there fuming at McCarthy. [I'm told that's probably Roy Cohn doing the fuming, not Fisher.])