The Smarmiest Bastard in all of Missouri

There are enough local characters in the news the past few days to make decent citizens of our metropolitan area want to just crawl under the bed and hide from the moral bankruptcy, abdication of decency, and embrace of depravity that seems to be centercased in a couple of court cases that are all over our front pages this month.

Let us consider one Daniel Porter, a non-custodial father who picked up his children for a scheduled weekend visit in June of 2004, and they haven't been seen since. He never returned the children, and has been sitting in jail on kidnapping charges ever since. He is quite adamant that he would rather die than reveal their whereabouts to the authorities or their mother. No one knows if he killed them and disposed of their bodies in an untraceable manner, or if they are "underground" with another family. He has family in a rural part of Missouri I know pretty well; an area where the locals wouldn't think twice about closing ranks aroundc one of their own and playing a game of "hide the babies." It's been done before, in fact, every family has someone in the tree who has played the game themselves.

Porters cocky arrogance makes my skin crawl. His sole justification in not revealing where his children are is to make their mother suffer. How can one parent turn so violently against the other? I truly believe that soon the type of psychotic behavior exhibited by parents such as Mr. Porter; who harm or hide their children solely to hurt the other parent; at great expense to the children, I might add - will warrant it's own diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

Porter seems to relish his status as a jailhouse celebrity, happy to be in jail so long as Tina, his ex-wife and the mother of Sam and Lindsay, suffers, not knowing the fate of her children, even whether they are dead or alive. He taunts her from his jail cell, and in the pages of the Star. As his case begins to move through the justice system this week, he has become more arrogant and smarmy with each passing interview.

A quote from Mr. Porter in today's KC Star has him stating that he can't wait to get to prison, he already runs things in the jail, and prison is just going to be like a new school. I hope it's a rude awakening for him, and the cocky bastard gets his just desserts.

So how do you deal with a prick like this? Seriously? Maybe something like Sodium Pentathol wouldn't be such a bad idea in certain limited instances, like this one? I keep taking the anti-torture stance on political discussion boards, but I can see the attraction of letting a Jack Bauer lose with this guy for a couple of hours.