One of my big beefs with many conservatives — especially those who call themselves libertarians — is that that even though they supposedly hate and fear big gubmint, they’re all for a huge spy-state apparatus (as long as a Republican is president), far-flung foreign wars, and the death penalty. So I applaud George Will for presenting the conservative case against the death penalty:
From Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” American history is replete with examples of printed words accelerating social justice. Still, from Mathew Brady’s 1862 photo exhibit of “The Dead of Antietam” to the televised fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 to the cameras that brought Vietnam into American living rooms, graphic journalism has exercised unique power to open minds and hence shape history. It may do so Tuesday evening when PBS broadcasts “The Central Park Five,” a meticulous narrative of a gross miscarriage of justice.
[….]Finally, this recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes, but it is a government program, so . . .
Very well said.
sonofsamantha
So you also agree with his climate change denial stance? Or his cheerleading of the Iraq war? Or his attacks on voter rights? Or any of the hundreds of other things Will gets wrong? The guy is wrong almost as much as Cole.
But…he said something you like recently so now he is your hero. Doug of the BJ Dougs again proves he lacks critical thinking skills.
Soonergrunt
stopped clocks, blind squirrels and their nuts, etc.
Punchy
What’s George Will’s batting average on this kind of stuff?
gbear
I notice your quote stops rather abruptly.
gbear
DougJ and Cole must be doing something incredibly right to inspire such incredibly moronic hatred.
Citizen_X
@sonofsamantha: Derp.
KG
@sonofsamantha: this is why I’ve come to hate politics as they currently exist. If someone dares to find common ground with someone on the other side, on just one single issue then that obviously means they agree and endorse everything that person says! For fuck’s sake! Even if this is a case of a stopped clock why can’t we be gracious enough to give credit where credit is due? Is it really so much better to always hate the other side so much that anything and everything they do is pure evil? That anyone who might agree with them on any single issue is by definition a fool or traitor or worse?
KG
@Citizen_X: you are much more succinct than I am
sonofsamantha
@KG: Other side of the aisle is not the same as trying to agree with someone from another planet.
I say the same thing about firebaggers too btw.
Comrade Jake
Yeah I’m not sure DougJ quite sees Will as a hero based on the OP here. More that he’s applauding someone for going against the grain.
Will is maddening, though. He’s insufferable on This Week. He masquerades as an intellectual when all along he’s just as likely as Liz Cheney to predict a Romney landslide.
Shortstop
The government can’t do anything right. Except try capital cases, which it does flawlessly. Good for Will, the underinformed, irrelevant old rughead, for getting this one right.
Frankensteinbeck
Most of the ‘no, he’s not right’ arguments center around the Pauls. This is important, because the Pauls are not a case of being right on some things but wrong on almost everything. The Pauls every once in awhile seem to be right on one thing because you’ve cut their opinion about that issue down to a sound bite. Rand and drones was a perfect example. He did not start a conversation about the sweeping authorizations of the AUMF or potential dangers of the technology. He started a conversation about whether or not Obama was going to bomb Real Merkins for the crime of not being black. Those tiny sound bites that sound okay are tied inextricably to horrible insane conspiracy theorist shit.
In this case, George Will is an ass, but on this one issue he seems to be right and I’m okay with admitting that.
Omnes Omnibus
That’s not a conservative case against the death penalty. It is a common sense case against it. Will is deliberately conflating the two.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@sonofsamantha: Thing is, not only is Will correct in this case, but his reasoning is rather sound for once. It’s not the “I oppose the federal government interfering in marriage” to allow states to declare homosexuality a crime type of reasoning that Ron Paul likes to use.
And, no, though, it doesn’t make his other stuff OK.
DougJ
@Comrade Jake:
Yes, indeed, we’re stuck with conservatives, like it or not, so we should applaud them when they make rational arguments.
MattW
Whenever I see a Republican wearing a cross pendant, I always wonder if it’s because they really really love Jesus, or because they really really love them some death penalty.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
This.
The fact that Rand Paul was pontificating about a hypothetical future case of government abuse at a time when there are already so many REAL ones, most of which he happily ignores, was probably the most offensive part of that grandstanding and the one that should’ve tipped everyone off that it was bullshit.
Patricia Kayden
@gbear: The whole article is pretty good actually, especially for George Will. Wonder why this particular case caught his attention.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: Will gets this right on the substance. The problem that I have with what he is saying is that he is trying to claim for conservatism one of the most basic common sense arguments against the death penalty – if you fuck it up, you can’t fix it. Anyone interested in the fair administration of justices should be concerned about it. But he wants to try to equate common sense and conservative in people’s minds. A fair way of expressing the death penalty argument would have been to have said that it was argument against it that liberals, conservatives, and anyone in between could support.
EthylEster
Here’s an EXCELLENT comment on Will’s article:
As a frequent critic of Will, I do commend him when he deserves it. The problem usually presents itself in instances where Will cannot resist revealing his bias even as he approaches reason about an issue. While I commend him in this case for promoting a documentary treatment of a gross miscarriage of justice, he comes up short in at least three areas:
First, Will characterizes the problem as one of class and not race, going so far as to suggest that race “probably” played no role in this tragic outcome. This is willful disregard for countless studies detailing the pervasive negative consequences of race upon a defendant’s chances in our criminal justice system. Will’s reliance on class also leaves one to question how class can play such a role in this injustice, yet be absent from Will’s analysis of other social problems. Also Will’s laudable concern for a “countervailing cohort of public defenders” flies in the face of the budgetary priorities that he promotes regularly.
The second and third problems are related and present in the last paragraph. Will claims that the tragedy “buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty,” leaving the misconception that only liberals and those who are insufficiently conservative have hampered conservatives from ending the barbarity of capital punishment. Although Will may well be a libertarian who opposes the death penalty personally, his characterization of the politics of this issue is intentionally misleading.
Lastly, Will creates a straw man. The phrase “[b]ut [capital punishment] is a government program, so . . .” leaves the impression that capital punishment would be ended in the United States if only those liberals would agree to end it, but no liberal would support ending even a barbarous government program.
Will lets the truly vociferous conservative supporters of capital punishment off the hook while laying its continuation at the feet of liberals. Dishonest.
sal
I’ve never understood the Christian conservative support of the death penalty while also supporting outlawing abortion.
I can understand, if not agree with, their abortion stance, but the Bible pretty clearly states in a pretty major section, in God’s own words, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Okay, that explains their abortion stance. What that commandment doesn’t state is ‘except’. It doesn’t say ‘except for people you feel committed heinous crimes, or who it would be expensive to keep locked up, or who are ruled by heinous people, or who believe in a different economic system.’ It doesn’t even say ‘Thou shalt not kill’. There are no outs. Sure, babies are innocent and murderers are not (except when they are), but that’s not a clause in the commandments either. How do you claim a fundamentalist, literal interpretation of the Bible and still support the death penalty? I just don’t get it.
Roger Moore
@gbear:
The sudden stop is in the original. Will is leaving off the obvious (to a Conservative) next step in the logical chain, that since it’s a government program it must be flawed. That said, it seems like the logical argument to try to convince Conservatives that they shouldn’t like the National Security State: that their belief in the incompetence of government shouldn’t be restricted to its attempts to help the poor and powerless.
Comrade Jake
@sal:
My understanding is that many Catholics oppose the death penalty. Of course, many of them are also pro-choice, so … who fucking knows.
patroclus
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, the idea that the police and prosecution make mistakes is more aptly the “liberal” case against the finality of the death penalty; not the “conservative” case. George Will commonly makes the mistake of saying that his views are necessarily the “conservative” position on issues on which no real conservatives agree – this is essentially dishonest. But as you say, it’s really more just common sense than ideological.
It’s good that he makes the common sense or liberal case, but he should be honest about it.
It’s kind of like when Andrew Sullivan tries to make the “conservative” case against torture or in favor of marriage equality. Actual conservatives don’t hold those positions.
Mandalay
I realize Will is attempting some dark humor, but there is no conservative case against the death penalty.
It’s ironic that Will usually loves throwing statistics into any article he writes. Had he done so for this one he could have made a powerful argument that the conservative case against the death penalty should be that of George Ryan: it is frequently wrongly administered.
But that would be a bridge too far for Will, so he settled for a cutesy joke about the government killing people by mistake instead.
mdblanche
I’m in no mood to read Will’s blathering about this right now. In the last few days all my favorite places to visit in Boston have become a crime scene. A city I love has been cruelly punched in the gut and three families will not be seeing their children again. Someone is mailing poisoned letters to politicians to be opened by their staffs, including the office of the senator where a friend of mine works. I’m no fan of the death penalty, but there really are evil people in the world and they are a threat to us. Deal with them as a law enforcement issue, but when the cops catch them throw everything in the book at them. What the motives for all this are I don’t know (but the timing of Will’s column is… suggestive) and I don’t care, but I’m unmoved by pleas for mercy.
Roger Moore
@sal:
It’s easy and perfectly consistent to oppose abortion as murder and still support capital punishment, and to use the Bible as justification for that belief. It’s clear from a broader reading of the Torah that the 6th Commandment is specifically against murder, not against all forms of killing. God is perfectly happy to tell people to kill in warfare (including commanding the Hebrews to commit genocide) and to spell out death as the appropriate punishment for a whole series of crimes, including not just murder but negligent homicide, adultery, witchcraft, and even extreme disobedience of one’s parents. If you want to use the Bible as a basis for arguments, you really need to read the whole thing, not just selected excerpts.
A Ghost To Most
Fuck you for making me read the words of George Fing Will.
I’d worked hard these past few months, studiously avoiding his column, or ABC Sunday am.
Damn you.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore:
I don’t really have time for that.
El Cruzado
@Comrade Jake: The official Catholic position is vehemently against both abortion and the death penalty.
Why Bishops and up decide to make a fight of one but not the other is another matter. Although I think they tend to get ignored when they don’t talk about America’s favorite bugaboo.
Howlin Wolfe
In a very good letter to the editor of a very bad paper (my local fishwrap), a reader pointed out the Geo. Effing Will was a real cheerleader for swift conviction of these same 5 kids. Will does not disclose that fact at all, but only blames “journalism” for failure, as if individual journalists, such as he is alleged to be, have nothing to do with it. A mea culpa would have been the least he could have provided. Giving us a film review isn’t very valuable.
Mandalay
@sal:
A fish rots from the head. If the churches themselves don’t explicitly oppose the death penalty then their followers will believe whatever they choose.
Just to be clear, the Catholic Church is opposed to the death penalty. Here is their web site: http://catholicsmobilizing.org/
Do any other major religions in the USA explicitly oppose the death penalty?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay:
Here is a listing.
Mandalay
@Omnes Omnibus: Thanks – that’s a great link. It led me to the words of Billy Graham:
The list of people I loathe more than Billy Graham is pretty short.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
If you don’t have time to read the whole Bible*, you probably shouldn’t use the parts you know to argue with people who have read the whole thing. It really does contain a lot of stuff, and you can’t understand the beliefs of somebody who’s read the whole shebang if you restrict yourself to the highlights.
*OK, you can probably skip most of the minor prophets, the Apocrypha, and the Song of Solomon, and you can skim the really boring parts like the begats and the furnishing of the tabernacle.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: Why are you bringing logic into this?
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Except that the parts of the Bible that say capital punishment is A-OK also say that abortion is just fine. You really have to cobble things together from different parts and ignore a lot of stuff in order to come up with that simultaneous combination.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@sonofsamantha:
Jesus Flaming Christ on a unicycle, talk about your non sequiturs…
The universe is big enough that there can be at least one topic that George Will and I (and presumably DougJ) can agree on. Hell, I can agree with Pat Fucking Buchanan on a couple of things. For example, Pat takes modern conservatives to task over their tendency to piss all over themselves at the slightest prospect of random terror attacks, when we spent the better part of 30 years living with the very real possibility of nuclear flaming death raining down on us from the heavens. I absolutely agree that modern conservatives are absolute pussies in that respect.
However, based on that, it simply does not follow that I agree with him or Will about fucking everything.
By this same token, since George Will is on record opposing the death penalty, does this mean you must necessarily support it? After all, if Will is wrong about hundreds of things, he must be wrong about this too, right?
If you don’t disagree, then what the fuck are you complaining about?
Shortstop
@Mandalay: the Roman Catholic Church is officially opposed to the death penalty.
The amount of time it doesn’t spend speaking out against it is telling.
JustRuss
So Will is perfectly happy to postualte that class is a factor when it comes to getting murdered by the state, but if anyone brings up tax increases on a panel upon which he sits he immediately starts braying “Class warfare!”, as if any mention of class divisions is verboten. Inconsistent much, George?
McJulie
@Roger Moore:
This sounds reasonable on the surface… but, no. Reading the whole Bible will not enlighten you as to the beliefs of conservative evangelicals. There’s simply no way to read the Bible in an objective fashion and get conservative evangelical doctrine out of it.
(I say this, because I did spend most of my youth trying to do just that.)
The best I can come up with for the pro-death/anti-abortion stance is that it has to do with evangelical purity culture (unborn babies = pure, prisoners, even innocent ones = impure), but that doesn’t come from the Bible.
debbie
So what if Will is right once in a millenium? He’s certainly right in this instance. What was done to those 5 kids was abominable. Ed Koch should be dug up and hung for proudly parading his bigotry. New York was very ugly at that time, as ugly as any small Southern town in the 1960s, and the city will never live that down.