In the future, everyone will be tough on crime for fifteen minutes

Some people are all in favor of criminal justice reform, unless the case is different because it makes them mad.

Michael Tracey is one of these writers, like Glenn Greenwald or Rod Dreher, who is absolutely catastrophically wrong when he’s wrong, but fist-pumpingly right when he’s right. And his take on the overturning of Bill Cosby’s criminal conviction, and his reaction to same from those who normally profess to be liberal criminal-justice reformers, is absolutely on point:

Courts don't “exonerate” criminal defendants or declare them "innocent" — they adjudicate whether the legal standards of guilt can be established in accordance with the due process protections set forth by the Constitution. You don’t need to have gone to law school to understand this basic concept. And yet, there’s an endless stream of people with high-profile media positions who apparently have no compunction about revealing their inability to grasp an elemental aspect of how the US government works.

When social media commentators, headline writers, and TV reporters scornfully dismiss the overturning of Bill Cosby’s sexu…