Selling Booze to Minors is a Serious Matter! Particularly if You're an Idiot.

If this story doesn't boil your potatoes, then you have no soul.  A clerk at a bodega (that's small corner shop for those of you squares!) was recently busted for selling Smirnoff Ice to a minor who happened to be an 18-year old auxiliary police officer.  (I'm guessing that's sort of like junior cops?)  The twist--the security camera shows that the clerk actually refused to sell the booze!  And of course the clerk, likely not the sort of moneybags who can afford a decent lawyer, pled guilty in order to avoid jail time.  There are many levels of outrage here:

1) Smirnoff Ice?  Really?  They still sell that crap?  If I were the clerk, I would have told the buyer to go home and hang his head in shame over such a purchase!  Or maybe suggest buying something less embarrassing, like a magazine for fans of tentacle porn.

2) A criminial justice system that goes ahead with convictions without checking things like oh I don't know SECURITY CAMERAS is a very broken system indeed.  We're not talking about expensive forensic analysis and expert witnesses here for crying out loud.

3) Why on earth are we wasting police resources trying to prosecute sales of booze to 18 year olds, who are old enough to go to war and be tried as adults?  An unjust and stupid law promulgated by the sort of morons who can't control their own kids so they want to make life difficult for everyone else, sure--but the cops really have nothing better to do?  I guess New York must have finally run out of murders and rapes.

I for one think a proper and measured response to this outrage would be to storm the courthouse with pitchforks and torches.  Of course, in the People's Republic of New York it's probably illegal to buy those too.