Thoughts on The Rachel Maddow Show

This is pretty random, there were just a couple of things in tonight's show that I thought worth commenting on. First is the foibles of Mitch McConnell, about which I would only like to say that I was told, during the school year two years ago, that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was a "rat bastard." That's a verbatim quote. I think that declaring, in public, that Democrats who advocated a phased withdrawal from Iraq were in favor of "cut-and-run" and surrendering to al-Qaeda on the very same day that you ask the President of the United States to begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq so that your party will be more likely to retain control of Congress qualifies you to be a rat bastard.

The other is about the fact that we now know, essentially beyond a reasonable doubt even though that standard is flagrantly irrelevant to this inquiry, that a man who was "executed" by the State of Texas on December 7th, 2000 was utterly and completely innocent. Not just "it is statistically certain that some innocent people have been "executed;"" literally the only evidence they had tying him to the scene of the crime proved to simply be someone else's hair. This has caused me to make the following decision: I do not consider execution to exist. It is simply murder. When the mechanisms of a U.S. state government, or the federal government, or any other government around the world kills someone on the grounds that they committed a heinous crime, they are not functioning as a legitimate government. As such, the act is a simple homicide, no messing about, no mincing words. When the word "execution" is appropriate in a sentence I will put quotes around it. It is an illegitimate practice in its entirety and I refuse to legitimize it even remotely by allowing itself to call itself by a fancy name. Killing is killing.

I feel about this similarly to how I feel reacting to Nelson Mandela's autobiography where he describes the various measures taken by the South African rulers in the 1960s, including a "law" "giving" them the "power" to detain a political prisoner for 90 days and, oh, yeah, however long they felt like it after that. It's simply not something a government can do, and so that regime controlling South Africa was not a government, but rather a bunch of people with guns wielding utterly illegitimate power. I don't think that the death penalty in this country totally invalidates our governments in all areas, though I would be open to being persuaded and in theory the strident ideologue in me is attracted to the idea; I just think that, when the machinery of our government acts to kill a person convicted of a crime, it is not acting as a government, it is acting as a bunch of people with guns.

As for the particulars of this case, Claude Jones was executed after the serial denial of his request to have the one piece of evidence tying him to the scene of some brutal murder, a hair the prosecution claimed was his, DNA tested. Two Texas courts turned him down, and the legal office of Governor George W. Bush excluded the DNA-testing controversy from their summary that they presented to the governor. Note that Bush does not bear particular moral responsibility here, though I would say there's a general moral responsibility to look pretty damn hard into any execution you are asked to approve as Governor. But still, the system of the Texas "justice" system conspired pretty damn effectively to murder Claude Jones, on December 7th, 2000, probably in the death chamber with a poison cocktail. God I hate the death penalty. There are two features of our current society that induce a level of pure moral outrage in me that is too strong to put into words; it transcends policy disagreements, and if I think about them for too long I find it hard to have an even remotely palatable opinion of our society. One is the institution that kills billions of non-human animals, almost all of them vertebrates, every year, and another is the institution by which the supposed democratic governing bodies of society kill hundreds of their own citizens every year. I just can't stand it. And now I'm going to go distract myself for a while, because, like I said, when I think about the institutions of meat-eating or capital punishment for too long, I just get mad.