the mojowire

If We Don't Kill The Innocent, People Won't Want To Kill The Guilty...

Ross Douthat, NYT Asshat Columnist and alleged Human Being writes in today's Gray Lady:

Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.

So let me get this straight... If we abolish the death penalty because we don't want to be executing the innocent, then people will lose faith in the judicial system as opposed to just executing the innocent because that will somehow generate confidence in our courts?

Really?

And while we're on the subject, what "more overall injustice" are you envisioning as a result of our abolishing capital punishment? What are the moral imperatives you see as the being worth the life of the innocent?

Further up in the article, Douthat makes a curious assertion:

The argument that capital punishment is inherently immoral has long been a losing one in American politics. But in the age of DNA evidence and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are just too fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more effective.

I think it is telling that apparently Douthat believes that while the argument from morality is a "losing one" for capital punishment opponents, that court's inherent fallibility is a more promising one. Does he really not understand that the fallible nature of human judgment is a moral argument? Or is he really that intellectually corrupt and/or morally bankrupt?

Yes, I am not completly thick, I get that even with a "perfect" system that never makes mistakes, capital punishment is still immoral. But for me, as a matter of pragmatism, the ethics involved with entrusting capital punishment to an overtly fallible system is also a moral issue, and the pressing one here.

And the part that gets me is that he admits that the death penalty is broken and that people are being sent to death row wrongly.

But that's okay, because:

Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe.

As an aside, he uses this reasoning as the cap stone for when he wonders off into no-man's land, trying to convince us that executing more prisoners and faster is actually more humane because our prison system has become so inhuman and brutal.

[crickets]

So we will alleviate the problems of the prison system and incarceration culture by just killing our prisoners more quickly.

[/crickets]

The barely disguised stench of bloodlust is fairly overpowering, here. Yet, we have just another example of the weakness of most conservative thought. Inflexibility.

Even when demonstrably wrongheaded and unreasonable, there is no limit to the types of choke holds, arm bars and joint locks they will put their rhetoric through, up to and including just making shit up out of whole cloth, to support a point of view.

If there was any doubt that the modern conservative movement is fundamentally unAmerican, just look at how people like Douthat excuse government abuse even as they bloviate at the top of their lungs how much they disdain and distrust government.

But when it comes to the ultimate government power, the ability to take the life of a citizen, well that's just fine, and hey if a few innocent get taken along the way, well, that's okay.

No, really, it's better that way for everyone because at least they can sleep well knowing that if we execute as many people as possible, the guilty will probably be executed too... for something they did... at some point...

mojo sends

...With The Sound Turned Off

I have a hard time taking the conservative establishment seriously today, as they whinge about Perry flubbing his line of attack on Romney for being a big-ole flip-flopping flip-flopper.

See... I turned off the higher functions of my brain last night and watched the GOP primary debate with the best approximation of the mindset of a low-information GOP primary race voter I could muster. This was the first time I've ever seen most of these goons on video at all, by the way.  (I take this job seriously, people.  You should pay me a lot more money.)

Perry looked cooler and more in control of himself than Romney.  I'm not going to comment at all on any of the other ankle-biters on that stage.  None of them have a chance of winning the nomination race next year.  The race is now Perry vs. Romney, and if you ask me, it's Perry's race to lose.  I don't discount him one iota. The man is slick.

There were a lot of moments in the debate where I saw Romney looking rattled when he was responding to some bullshit Perry was throwing at him.  Sure, Romney sounded more coherent, if you're some kind of pencil-necked liberal toad who cares about shit like that, but he kept nervously stabbing at the air with his finger and looking like he was trying to explain his way out of getting caught stealing from the tip jar.

Perry, on the other hand, looked very relaxed.  When he descended into word salad, in that moment everybody is talking about today, I heard what he was actually trying to say just fine, and he came off sounding like he was just tired of having to repeat it all the damned time for the benefit of those willful idiots who need it explained over and over again before they'll get it.

If I'm a regular GOP primary voter watching that debate, then here's what I'm thinking: Romney can't be trusted, he's not of the tribe and he doesn't really have the instincts necessary to charge into a battle with Obama, in the vanguard of the initial advance, waving the GOP Teapartian banner like a bloody shirt.  I'm thinking Romney won't be able to shake Obama and his people into the proper level of Fear and Loathing.

I'm thinking Romney might be shaking with the Fear himself.

Perry, on the other hand, I know rattles Obama and all the liberal retards I hate with a purple passion.  Perry scares the fuck out of those people, and well they should be scared.  Perry loathes them too, and Perry will do his best to put them in their place, and he isn't afraid to be seen doing it.

I mean, that bastard takes pride in putting innocent black people to the big spike just to prove he can do it with impunity.

So, of course, I'm going to like Perry after this.  Perry rattles the liberals.  He rattled Romney.  He'll rattle Obama.  He'll put the Fear And Loathing Of God Almighty into the whole damned country and that's just what your regular GOP primary voter wants.

This is Perry's race to lose, I tell you.

Take a good long look at your next President Of The United States, people, because there's a good chance that Obama and his people will not know how to handle the unbelievable level of bullshit that the Perry campaign will start throwing at them in the general election.

In a Mood...

Yeah. Mojo's in a mood. Maybe it started with the two executions last night, of which only one seems to be bothering anyone. (Yeah, Lawrence Brewer was a muderous racist craphound, but that does not matter. The death penalty is wrong. Period.)

But I think this goes back several weeks. Listening to people cheer The Man From FAIL's death penalty record in Texas, or cheering for a person without insurance to die instead of recieve government assistance, or MB claiming HPV vaccine causes mental retardation or Eric Cantor trying to blow up the government that currently pays his salary... people accusing me of class warfare for daring to push back against the rich and powerful and having the temerity to ask for fairer treatment for the those on the margins of society.

But I think what's really got me going good now has been the asshattery from the likes of Andrew Brietbart, who openly told a crowd of people he'd like to take "the first shot" because he thinks the military would side with the Tea Party in a civil war. Or some other tool saying that allowing the poor to vote is like "giving a burglar a key to your house..."

And he's not that far out from what passes for mainstream rhetoric in the Republican Party these days. The war on plurality is joined and is only going to get worse, particularly for the next 14 months or so.

I really thought my political warring days were over... I really did.

Back to the front lines...

 

mojo sends