Of the 17 topical distractions from serious news that the White House creatively has introduced since last January – think minimum wage, think sexism, think income gap, think student loans — opposition to the death penalty is the easiest to counter.
What is complicated or morally troubling about executing a convicted killer, about punishing with finality a raging person who has harshly snuffed out the life – in many cases – of a rival?
The left-wing Huffington Post was wringing its fingers this morning because three nasty killers were scheduled to be executed within 24 hours.
Typically misplacing sympathy, punishment is antithetical to the left, the nexus of their problem with the normal world.
The left traditionally resists punishment on the grounds that most of the time mitigating circumstances darkly, quietly loomed in the killer’s background, excusing his crime.
• One stabbed to death his estranged wife and her five-year-old son.
• One shot in the head his former girlfriend and two pals of hers, killing the friends and blinding his ex-paramour.
• One raped and murdered his 15-year-old neighbor.
However, liberals are blanketedly wed to the notion that taking the life of a convicted man is wrong – and there is an explanatory excuse in each case.
Two months ago, the left whirled into an instant nationwide frenzy when lethal drugs improperly were injected into the veins of a beastly killer. They protested because the killer appeared to “suffer needlessly” before finally dying of a heart attack.
All three executions – two last night, one this evening – are conducted by lethal injections, a problem for the left-wing Associated Press. It fretted over the potential avoidable suffering of the unfortunate convicted bad guys.
Fearing a repeat of the briefly botched Oklahoma execution, the A.P. said this morning:
“All three states refuse to say where they get their drugs, or if they are tested. Lawyers for two of the condemned inmates have challenged the secretive process used by some states to obtain lethal injection drugs from unidentified, loosely regulated compounding pharmacies.”
