NY Times: Hey, Everybody Throw a Pity Party for This Stupid Dopehead Kid!

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Maxwell Birnbaum: Dumber than an Alabama cop.

It’s so unfair that he got caught!

In March last year, a college freshman named Maxwell Birnbaum was riding in a van filled with friends from Austin, Tex., to a spring-break rental house in Gulf Shores, Ala. As they neared their destination, the police pulled the van over, citing a faulty taillight. When an officer asked if he could search the vehicle, the driver — a fraternity brother of Mr. Birnbaum’s who quickly regretted his decision — said yes.
Six Ecstasy pills were found in Mr. Birnbaum’s knapsack, and he was handcuffed and placed under arrest. Mr. Birnbaum later agreed to enter a multiyear, pretrial diversion program that has involved counseling and drug tests, as well as visits to Alabama every six months to update a judge on his progress. . . .
[T]he mug shot from his arrest is posted on a handful of for-profit Web sites . . . These companies routinely show up high in Google searches; a week ago, the top four results for “Maxwell Birnbaum” were mug-shot sites. . . .
[T]hese pictures can cause serious reputational damage, as Mr. Birnbaum learned in his sophomore year, when he applied to be an intern for a state representative in Austin. Mr. Birnbaum heard about the job through a friend.
“The assistant to this state rep called my friend back and said, ‘We’d like to hire him, but we Google every potential employee, and the first thing that came up when we searched for Maxwell was a mug shot for a drug arrest,’ ” Mr. Birnbaum said. “I know what I did was wrong, and I understand the punishment,” he continued. “But these Web sites are punishing me, and because I don’t have the money it would take to get my photo off them all, there is nothing I can do about it.”

Here’s your problem: You’re stupid, Maxwell.

Six measly tabs of Ecstasy?

Dude, back in the Seventies, I sold dope in felony-weight quantities and never once got busted. Because I was not stupid.

OK, I was a Democrat back then and that was intensely stupid, but at least I wasn’t stupid enough to get busted for dope.

It’s a Darwinian thing, Maxwell. You’re obviously inferior.

Despite my past as a long-haired adolescent dopehead, I am in favor of strict enforcement of Our Nation’s Laws Against Dangerous Drugs, because I don’t want people who are too stupid to out-smart a narc to be running around on the streets, clogging up traffic on the highways and, potentially, replicating their hopelessly stupid genes.

When the cops catch a stupid dopehead, I want that drug-addled idiot sentenced to the maximum extent of the law.

So, no, I don’t pity you for your “reputational damage,” Max, because if you’re dumber than a cop in Baldwin County, Alabama, you’re obviously so stupid we need to warned about your stupidity.

 

71 comments

  1. “So, no, I don’t pity you for your “reputational damage,” Max, because if you’re dumber than a cop in Baldwin County, Alabama, you’re obviously so stupid we need to warned about your stupidity.”

    Now that is wicked cold. So much so my nuts froze and fell off. But funny.

  2. You are only 18 for one year, but the internet is forever.

    But at least most of us got “stupid” anonymously. Now days, these idiots post proof of their own stupidity on Facebook, brag about it, and then get upset when it bites them in the butt a few years later.

    “Stupid is as stupid does.”

  4. Right, when holding the first thing you do after getting in your friends car is stash the dope somewhere in the car.

    Dopeheads tending to have dopehead friends this is entirely kosher.

  6. “Dude, back in the Seventies, I sold dope in felony-weight quantities and never once got busted. Because I was not stupid.”

    Stacey, you are stupid. Being a doper in the 70’s is nothing to be proud of.

    It is not something that you should point to pride with your wife and children.

  7. I differ on this. That Stacy is the man he is today and publicly admits his faults and errors shows the reality of Redemption. All are capable of being redeemed in both the religious sense as well as the purely social and cultural sense.

  9. 100% correct. Without getting into TMI territory, I can relate to what he went through. The late 70’s and early 80’s were a horrific time to be teenager/young adult.

  10. To be fair, most cops weren’t as aggressive, interested or had the time to conduct car searches as a normal part of a traffic stop.

    That Birnbaums buddy granted the search then Birnbaum should have some words with him and he shouldn’t have taken the plea deal.

    This guy seems to be another slacker douchebag who had slid through life on his folks dough and his cute looks and was going to wind up impregnating some sorry slackerette who’d wind up on welfare and out protesting Womyn’s issues at the drop of a vagina.

    Maxwell should maybe suck it up butter cup and lie on his applications or become a little smarter and little bit quicker and learn how to earn some money. Either that or sponge off mom (or dad) till they start drawing SS then he’ll HAVE to get a job.

  14. Sucks to be a loser, Max!

    The websites are within their rights to publish the mugshots which are a matter of public record.

    Instead of publicly whining about getting caught, which only increases your exposure, you could get some friends and attempt to Google-bomb yourself by posting mentions on the web that have nothing to do with the mugshot. Go for it, make sure they are all stories of your heroics in saving children from burning buildings or something. Eventually you take over the results and push the mugshots to the second page, where fewer will look.

    I bet he voted for Obama.

  17. Silly and dangerous logic.
    It’s okay to be a fucking asshole so long as you a. don’t get caught and b. repent some day?

    So in 10 years, when Kate Hunt says, “sorry bout the rape guyz, I love Jesus now” all will be forgiven? lol

  18. Fun, but costly. Of my friends circa 78-82 the majority crashed and burned and have never really recovered to anything approaching their potential.

  21. It takes a special type of hubris to brag about your former career as a “felony-weight” drug dealer, while at the same mocking an 18-year old for getting busted on a small possession charge, and then congratulate society on destroying his life in the process. Time to look in the mirror, dude. Also, back in the 70’s? You were just lucky, man. Not smart. Lucky. Ain’t no award for “lucky”.

  22. You sold dope in felony-weight quantities and I’ve been giving you money for free…. *glares at universe*

  24. You are, at some point in your life, going to be a fucking asshole. Everybody will. The difference is a) whether you take responsibility for your actions and consequences, b) do something to make amends and, yes, c) sincerely repent.

  25. Stacy,

    I really enjoy your site, but you do not need to point out that you were a doper in the 70’s.

    You are just feeding the trolls.

  27. You were just lucky, man. Not smart. Lucky. Ain’t no award for “lucky”

    Dude, if you only knew.

    Anyway, the point in recounting my career as a teenage hoodlum is this: Criminals neither need nor deserve sympathy.

    Sympathy is the worst thing in the world for young criminals. The anti-social attitude of the arrogant punk who scoffs at the law is generally combined with an irresponsible attitude of self-pity and blame-shifting: It’s not his fault he broke the law, it’s society’s fault for enforcing the law. The defiant hoodlum wants to point the finger of blame — at the cops, at his parents, at his school — so that responsibility can be shifted to someone, anyone, other than himself.

    Bullshit. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Nobody threw a pity party for me when, my senior year in high school, some of my dope buddies robbed Kentucky Fried Chicken and I got arrested and charged as an accomplice because I’d partied with them afterwards.

    I neither deserved pity nor expected it, and nobody was protesting about my “rights.” Nobody viewed me as a victim. If bad luck had anything to do with my arrest, my hanging around with hoodlums was choice, not luck. And I was acquitted, having learned a hard lesson the hard way. The law was right and I was wrong, but I was not stupid — or at least, not stupid enough to go down for that rap.

    Having become wise the hard way, I know how these criminal punks think. This stupid Birnbaum kid never thought he’d get caught, and he wants people to think of him as a victim. This shows he has not learned his lesson, and I expect this means he has future lessons ahead of him.

    Benjamin Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

  28. When I saw that he’d applied for a job as a legislative intern, I immediately guessed “Democrat.” Stupid dopehead? Yeah, it’s logical.

  30. Eh, I blame Bill Clinton.

    Remember when everybody thought it was such a great thing when Clinton said he would put 100,000 new cops on the street?

    This led to a general expansion of police forces everywhere, not just in “inner cities” (a racial code, as Clinton’s proposal was aimed at appealing to white suburban women, i.e., “soccer moms”) but everywhere. A lot of these cops were deployed in the revenue-producing operation of traffic enforcement, so that when you see a cop doing radar stops on the side of the highway, you can thank Bill Clinton.

  31. The year I graduated high school, according to annual surveys done by “Who’s Who Among American High School Students,” was the peak of the dope epidemic. As I recall, about three-quarters of high school seniors in 1977 had tried marijuana. That’s just a fact.

    And I’m not bragging, just explaining the basis of my contempt for criminals who try to play victim.

    Victim, my ass. You got caught, punk. You can feel sorry for yourself, but your self-pity does not entitle you to my sympathy.

  32. Indeed. Having survived all that, I well remember the victims — Ginger Whiteside comes to mind — and warn my kids against going down the wrong path.

    Just look what happened to that dopehead punk Barrett Brown.

  33. Heh. That was decades ago, Richard. And my experience as a freelance pharmaceutical distributor has certainly been helpful in this journalism business.

  34. It were a joke. I NEVER used the stuff after about the age of 17. And that was a lot longer ago than I care to contemplate.

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