By ChewbaccaD:
...He's not legally trained, so your condescension is truly misplaced there. As to his final point, no it isn't wrong at all. Again, you explain how one is to investigate and expose a conspiracy with no incentives given to the members of the conspiracy who can give up the bigger fish.
Contrary to your ignorant assertion that Armstrong was just another one of the guys, he was the driving force behind this. He was the star who promoted himself as a savior. He was the one with enough marketability to provide actual pressure to overlook or to force other organizations and people to become complicit in his lie. Lets face it, he made a lot of people A LOT of money. He became a marketing machine, superhero figure by his own hand. He is addicted to the hero status. A person like that can make a lot of people do a lot of things. You keep acting like he was just one of the guys. Deserves no more attention than anyone else. That is a false narrative. It is either willfully ignorant of reality, or just plain ignorant.
You keep pretending that you are just a dispassioned observer. Your narrative is easy enough to pick up on, so it doesn't really matter how much you yell your belief in your own objectivity. Anyone with a sense of reason can tell you are blind to your own bias. Me, I am biased as hell against Armstrong. That doesn't alter the fact that what the USADA did with the witnesses was nothing unprecedented, and completely consistent with the model of criminal prosecutions. Again, the pushers and dealers always deserve to be more harshly punished than the users. You will not be able to pretend that Armstrong was just one of the guys for too much longer. Better get your hits in now while you can. Not to mention the fact that Armstrong was offered the same deal as everyone else, but he refused to even talk to the USADA. Bad choice that, I think we can all agree.
Applause and compliments!
What I don't get is how so many people can in good faith equate a bias against Armstrong, for all the reasons you mention, with a tainted sense of justice and to present that as a "demonstration" of why the USADA case is a "witch hunt" without scruples. When LA and company have always been unscrupulousness personified. In fact one finds the man so appalling simply because of all the appalling things he has done during his career: organized doping and trafficking of doping products, corruption, bribery, slander, coercion, intimidation of witnesses, mendacity, deception, baseness. Thus only in finding him appalling can one see clearly in terms of justice and injustice here, can one perceive reality and not all the falsehood that is exchanged for fact by those who continue to love and support him.
Then there are the knowing cynics, most of whom are in the annals of cycling history. I have never met a lower brand of hypocrites in all my life. Chief among them is Eddie Merckx, who is both a tool and a hypocrite, and who only wishes for convenience sake to preserve the false image of the sport he has always thrived on, also financially, instead of the truth, which is lethal to his interests. Merckx, like the others, is always complaining to the press about how cycling is being unjustly persecuted by it, that it does more than any other sport to fight doping with testing (blah, blah, blah) and that the public shouldn't be exposed to this ceaseless barrage of journalistic negativity. What Merckx forgets, or neglects to mention, however, is that cycling since his era has always been rife with doping, that since the 90's and EPO it went from bad to definitively worse in becoming a grotesque arms race under medical supervision and that, still worse, the governing body of cycling cynically runs its own anti-doping program with an appalling conflict of interests the result being that for 7 years it gave their marketing icon immunity to pursue a super sophisticated doping regime without the threat of being sanctioned, was thus complicit in the fraud and now tries to obstruct, or at least not cooperate, with an air-tight USADA case against him. Merckx is in favor of the code of silence and has lost all intelectual as well as moral purchase in supporting the cancer within the sport, which for 7 long years was represented by the very man he finds so praisworthy.
If it weren't so pathetic the viewpoints of the likes of Merckx it would simply be nauseating and revolting. I have lost all respect for these guys.