Wednesday, January 22, 2003

The Mad Executioner George Bush may go down in history as a madman.  Or he may not.  What happens is totally out of his control, and that is a scary thought.  Bush’s drive for war, with no evidence and in the face of overwhelming opposition, reminds me of his role as chief executioner in Texas.   Under his term as governor, 152 Texans were put to death.  In the face of mounting evidence that many poor and black defendants ended up on death row despite innocence, Bush said his state has never put an innocent man or woman to death under his leadership and that in “every case,” the person executed received adequate legal representation.   That is a total lie.  Back during the campaign, when there was the tiniest amount of press investigation into his conduct, the Chicago Tribune published an article looking at the legal representation of the men who had been executed by Bush.  The Tribune found that defense attorneys who have been publicly sanctioned for misconduct represented 43 of those inmates. Forty others had lawyers who presented no evidence or only one witness during the critical sentencing phase of their trials. And dozens of others reportedly were convicted with the help of unreliable physical evidence or the testimony of non-credible witnesses.   Added together, this means that a substantial majority of all Texans executed by Bush did not have adequate legal representation, and if the patterns that exist in other capital punishment states are true, it is quite likely that one or more of these victims were innocent.   What does this have to do with Iraq, and the madness of George Bush.  The connection is his fundamentalist refusal to look at evidence.  He lives in his own born-again world, where faith replaces reason, where wish replaces investigation, and control of everyone and everything around him is the holy grail.   When someone this deranged is in a position of power and things work out for him, through luck or happenstance, all breathe a sigh of relief and say he wasn’t so bad after all. In the case of executions, it is the difficulty of retrying a case after the death of the accused, plus the unwillingness of the Texas justice system to allow such an examination that prevents an open inquiry.  With Iraq, so far we haven’t lost thousands of Americans, ignited a generations long war with the Arabs, destroyed the open climate for global trade and investment, nor collapsed the American economy.    When things don’t work out, the person who was tolerated as sane is looked upon as a madman.  The military generals who led Japan were revered until they were totally defeated.  It was only after the fact that their drive decision to attack the U.S. was seen as a disaster.  Kennedy is widely revered for toughness during the Cuban missile crisis, but if his toughness had been ultimately called, and the U.S. and Russia began a nuclear exchange, his belligerence would have been seen as madman’s folly, that plunged the U.S. into a nuclear nightmare.   So it is with Bush—whether he is remembered as a madman or not is rapidly slipping out of his control.  Having this kind of leader in power is very scary, because it’s a role of the dice whether the facts fit his mind, because you know that his mind will never fit the facts. 11:04:08 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 2/2/2003; 5:54:55 PM.