Mrs. Green (in the kitchen baking Christmas cookies): Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Son of a bitch. Fuck. Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Shit! Son of a bitch! Shit! SHIT!
Mr. Green (from the other room): What's wrong?
Mrs. Green: NOTHING!!!
... that has nothing to do with the preceding post:
"... there came a great noise: a rolling Boom that seemed to come from the depths far below, and to tremble in the stone at their feet... Doom, doom it rolled again, as if huge hands were turning the very caverns of Moria into a vast drum... Doom, doom came the drum-beat and the walls shook.
- from "The Fellowship of the Ring", J.R.R. Tolkein
This is how the news led on Chicago news radio 780 AM at 5:30 this morning: Bush made a speech last night about Iraq. Republicans liked it, Democrats didn't. Lots and lots of Americans have been killed there. Some more were killed yesterday. An American hostage was killed. Insurgants set off a car bomb at a children's hospital that killed two people. An Illinois woman who lost her legs when the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq was shot down is now running for Congress as a Democrat. She says the insurgants in Iraq think we're there for the oil. She wants to be elected so she can vote to never send our soldiers into harm's way for the wrong reasons, like we did in Iraq. "And as if the Bush White House needed any more problems," some Socialist who may have just been elected in Bolivia is promising to be "America's worst nightmare". He's promising to end an American-sponsored program to destroy coca production.
I think they may have also wanted to report on how many Iraqis died of old age yesterday and how Bush just let them die, some guy in Ohio said Bush is a "big doody-head", Diane Feinstein worries that Bush is dining on the flesh of women and minorities, and as if Bush needed any more problems, the guy who lost the last election in Outer Turdistan promises that if he is elected next time, he will have a huge Bush Hatin' Celebration at which Turds will fire guns into the air and chant anti-American slogans while waving large mocking puppets of Bush.
But they only had five or six minutes to hit the very most important stuff because they needed a commercial break before "traffic on the 8's" rolled around at 5:38.
Steven M. Gorelick sure beats the hell out of somebody or something in a Chicago Tribune editorial today (reg req'd) about the execution of multiple murderer and vicious street gang founder Stanley Williams:
Whew! I have waited for 24 years to feel this safe.
...
I will finally have peace, or at least a few moments of it, knowing that my family and I are safe.
Stanley "Tookie" Williams is dead.
I am safe. We are all safe. Unbolt the doors and turn off the alarms. Society got off its duff.
Just when I thought the world was spiraling out of control, Just when I thought we were condemned to live with an almost limitless supply of evil, hope for the future has presented itself in the execution of Stanley Williams.
...
After all, Stanley is dead.
We are safe at last, safe at last, safe at last.
Don't you all feel safe at last?
Withering sarcasm is only effective if your audience can decipher what the hell you're getting at. The one thing I'm sure Professor Gorelick and I would agree on is that Williams's execution did not make us any safer from a global avian flu pandemic, terrorist attack, obesity, malaise, boredom, or another idiotic remake of a bad 70's TV show into a movie.
But is he suggesting that anybody thinks his execution would make anybody safer from those things? Is he saying that safety is the reason for capital punishment, as opposed to justice? Is he saying that capital punishment is an effort by our government to get us to depend on them for relief of our real and imagined fears? Is he saying that in a world where we are beseiged by all sorts of real terrors, the execution of one convicted murderer is inconsequential? I have no idea what point he is trying to make.
But I'm afraid (literally) I might agree with him on the execution. I generally don't believe in the death penalty, but not because I think someone who did what Williams was convicted of doesn't deserve to die. On the contrary, lethal injection is far too kind a fate for such a person. However, I don't trust the government to successfully distinguish the guilty from the innocent 100% of the time. If letting Tookie live out his days in prison at taxpayer expense is the cost of making sure the state never executes an innocent person, then that's fine with me.