Is Rick Perry speaking to himself?

Rick Perry's motto is, "Keep it simple, stupid". 

Is he speaking to himself? 

Curious Carl

----- Original Message -----

From: Claude Everett

To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'

Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2011 9:00 AM

Subject: Opinion: They Messed With Texas

September 9, 2011, 7:15 pm
They Messed With Texas
By PETER CATAPANO

The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being
debated across the online spectrum.

Tags:
death penalty, Election 2012, presidential debates, republicans, rick perry,
Sept. 11



A funny thing happened at the Republican debate at the Reagan Library in
California on Wednesday night, when the evening's co-moderator Brian
Williams asked a question of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. (Not funny ha-ha,
funny peculiar.) Let's go right to the video.


For the text oriented among us, here's what transpired.

WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed
234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have
you.

(APPLAUSE)

Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those
might have been innocent?

PERRY: No, sir. I've never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas
has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which - when someone
commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair
hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme
Court of the United States, if that's required.

But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of
our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime
and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the
state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed.

WILLIAMS: What do you make of.

(APPLAUSE)

What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the
execution of 234 people drew applause?

PERRY: I think Americans understand justice. I think Americans are clearly,
in the vast majority of - of cases, supportive of capital punishment. When
you have committed heinous crimes against our citizens - and it's a
state-by-state issue, but in the state of Texas, our citizens have made that
decision, and they made it clear, and they don't want you to commit those
crimes against our citizens. And if you do, you will face the ultimate
justice.

For some - in this case, opponents of the death penalty - this was sort of a
double whiplash moment, a gasp within a gasp that may have been more
confusing than mobilizing. Because which was more disturbing (or heartening,
depending on your political view)? Perry's unbowed defense of the
"thoughtful" trial process in Texas and the clear expression of his
untroubled mind in the face of possible moral doubt and complexity (i.e.,
Have I facilitated the death of an innocent human?)? Or the audience
applause that bracketed the exchange, the rousing audience cheers for an
aggressively applied death penalty? In California, mind you, not Texas.

Let's look at the applause, the "execution cheer," if you will. Because any
number of analysts might have expected Perry to say what he said, but the
cheer was a surprise - a welcome sort for some, but unwelcome for others.

This is the digital age, so let's begin with an immediate outburst from
Andrew Sullivan, who during his live blogging of the debate, wrote:

9.48 pm. A spontaneous round of applause for executing people! And Perry
shows no remorse, not even a tiny smidgen of reflection, especially when we
know for certain that he signed the death warrant for an innocent man.
Here's why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly
cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.
This is the crowd that believes in torture and executions. Can you imagine
the torture that Perry would authorize? Thank God he's doing so poorly
tonight.

The next morning, Sullivan's former colleague, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi
Coates, seemed somewhat less rattled, though hardly cheerier. "Apparently
people were shocked by the applause here," he wrote. "The only thing that
shocked me was that they didn't form a rumba line. It's a Republican debate.
And it's America." He continued:

Perry's right - most people support the death penalty. It's the job of those
of us who oppose the death penalty to change that.

It's worth remembering that no Democratic nominee for the presidency in some
twenty years, has been against the death penalty. This is still the country
where we took kids to see men lynched, and then posed for photos.

We are a lot of things. This is one of them.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon found it unwelcome, too. Actually he found it
"creepy and disgusting." (Greenwald, like Perry, is direct.). In a
link-laden broadside, he wrote:

[I]t's hardly surprising for a country which long considered public hangings
a form of entertainment and in which support for the death penalty is
mandated orthodoxy for national politicians in both parties.  Still, even
for those who believe in the death penalty, it should be a very somber and
sober affair for the state, with regimented premeditation, to end the life
of a human being no matter the crimes committed.  Wildly cheering the
execution of human beings as though one's favorite football team just scored
a touchdown is primitive, twisted and base.

All of that would be true even if the death penalty were perfectly applied
and only clearly guilty people were killed.  But in the U.S., the exact
opposite is true; see here to read about (and act to stop) a horrific though
typical example of a very likely innocent person about to be executed by the
State of Georgia.  That Perry in particular likely enabled the execution of
an innocent man - as well as numerous other highly disturbing killings, of
the young and mentally infirm - makes the cheering all the more repellent.
That the death penalty in America has long been plagued by a serious racial
bias makes it worse still.  That this death-cheering comes from a party that
relentlessly touts itself as "pro-life" and derides the other as The Party
of Death - and loves to condemn Islam (in contrast to its war-loving self)
as a death-glorifying cult - only adds a layer of dark irony.

That whole "perfectly applied" thing - the goal of which requires the person
being put to death to actually be guilty - also troubled others. Marie
Diamond at Think Progress Justice undertakes a thorough debunking of the
idea that everyone executed in Texas in the past decade or so was guilty:

[D]uring Perry's tenure as governor, DNA evidence has exonerated at least 41
people convicted in Texas, Scott Horton writes in Harper's. According to the
Innocence Project, "more people have been freed through DNA testing in Texas
than in any other state in the country, and these exonerations have revealed
deep flaws in the state's criminal justice system." Some 85 percent of
wrongful convictions in Texas, or 35 of the 41 cases, are due to mistaken
eyewitness identifications.

Those exonerations include Cornelius Dupree, who had already spent 30 years
in prison for rape, robbery, and abduction when DNA evidence proved
unequivocally that he was not the man who had committed those crime. Tim
Cole, the brother of Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis (D), was posthumously pardoned
a decade after he died in prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence. The
total failure of the Texas courts to protect these innocent individuals
reveal a system plagued by racial injustices, procedural flaws, and a
clemency review process that's nothing but a rubber stamp on executions.

Leading the country in wrongful convictions probably should give Perry a
moment's pause about the reliability of a criminal justice process he
described last night as "thoughtful." .

And he may well have already executed an innocent man. The case of Cameron
Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson deaths of his three
daughters and maintained his innocence until his dying day, will likely
continue to haunt Perry throughout the campaign. Several scientists and
forensics experts have questioned the evidence that led to Willingham's
conviction, but Perry "squashed" an official probe into his execution.

(Here is an interactive graphic of executions under Governor Perry, from the
Texas Tribune.)

Taking another tack, political animal Steve Benen at Washington Monthly
notes the apparent inconsistency in Perry's much-discussed attitude towards
science:

[W]e're learning quite a bit about how Rick Perry thinks. Scientists tell
him, after rigorous, peer-reviewed, international research that global
warming is real, and Perry responds, "I don't care." A deeply flawed
judicial process puts potentially-innocent Americans on death row, and Perry
responds, "Let's get the killin' started."

The governor balks when presented with evidence on evolution, abstinence
education, and climate change, but embraces without question the notion that
everyone he's killed in Texas was 100 percent guilty. The scientific
process, he apparently believes, is unreliable, while the state criminal
justice system is infallible.

Intellectually, morally, and politically, this isn't just wrong; it's scary.
The fact that Republicans in the audience found this worthy of hearty
applause points to a party that's bankrupt in more ways than one.

Of course, as Coates pointed out, this is America, and thus Perry's stance
was praised by some as proof (not scientific) that the governor was truly
sympatico with the average American death penalty supporter.

An interesting opinion of this sort was aired by James Taranto at The Wall
Street Journal. Taranto reaches way back to the year 2000 to a New Republic
piece by Josh Marshall, which explained every other civilized country's ban
on the death penalty as political "elitism" - the populous in most countries
support the death penalty, but their politicians forbid it. In other words,
the political systems in these other countries are "morally superior" but
"less democratic," Marshall wrote. "[I]n Europe and Canada elites have
exercised a kind of noblesse oblige. They've chosen a more civilized and
humane political order over a fully popular and participatory one. It's a
perfectly defensible position - but it might not go over that well on
'Crossfire.' "

("Crossfire" was cancelled in 2005, but you get the picture, right?)

Eleven years on, Taranto elaborates, explaining the audience applause as
rooted in a sort of patriotism:

It seems to us that the crowd's enthusiasm last night was less sanguinary
than defiant. The applause and the responses to it reflect a generations-old
mutual contempt between the liberal elite and the large majority of the
population, which supports the death penalty.

There are, of course, reasonable arguments against the death penalty. But
opponents are too resentful at their inability to steamroll over public
opinion as if this were Europe or Canada to argue their case effectively.
One of their most ludicrous tropes is to liken the U.S. to authoritarian
regimes that also practice capital punishment. In reality, as Marshall
showed, America still has the death penalty because it is less authoritarian
than Europe. Thus whenever someone makes that argument, we feel a tinge of
patriotic pride. We believe a similar sentiment lay behind last night's
applause.

(Weirdly, the caption beneath the photo of Perry read simply, "Rick Perry
has executive experience." Italics mine.)

Another oddity of this dust-up was the digital shrapnel that hit Brian
Williams for asking the obvious question. Matthew Sheffield at
Newsbusters.org (devoted, in the site's own words, to "exposure of liberal
media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely
corrections to news media reporting.") argued that Williams showed a lot of
liberal elitist gall for even going there:

As someone who makes his living by trying to appeal, at least in some
fashion, to the emotions of crowds, Williams's inability to understand the
audience's spontaneous outbreak of applause response to his declaration that
Texas "has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in
modern times" is a classic case of a liberal elitist being unable to compute
that his smugly held opinions are not shared by others. It was the media
analog of 1988 Democratic presidential nominee's Michael Dukakis's anodyne
response when asked in a debate about whether he would want a hypothetical
murderer of his wife executed.

But perhaps I'm selling Williams's perspicacity short. One suspects he would
likely have understood a similar audience reaction were it to applaud
enthusiastically a Democratic candidate's firm support for abortion
legalization. Such a response could equally be perceived as grisly but it
seems unlikely that Williams would entertain such a thought.

Ann Althouse also accused Williams of baiting, not unlike a certain CNN
anchor at a 1988 Democratic presidential debate:

Williams -skillfully - lures Perry into the realm of emotion. Perhaps he's
looking for a big moment, perhaps something like what happened to Michael
Dukakis in the second presidential debate in 1988. Dukakis was against the
death penalty, and the question asked by Bernard Shaw invited him to show
some passion and fire about crime - what if your wife were raped and
murdered? - and Dukakis stayed doggedly on his track, expressing coolly
rational rejection of the death penalty.

In last night's debate, Perry declined the invitation to show passion about
death - the death of the convicted murderer - and, like Dukakis, he stayed
coolly rational. In Sullivan's words, he "shows no remorse" or "reflection"
- but he did show reflection, reflection about the soundness of the system
of justice. He didn't show remorse. Remorse is what you ask a criminal to
show. It was fine for Perry not to be lured into displaying angst over
executions. But then I thought it was fine for Dukakis to keep from getting
sidetracked by Shaw's melodramatic hypothetical. All we're talking about is
the public's response to the candidate and the journalist's effort to create
excitement. The difference is, most Americans support the death penalty, and
they don't need elaborate expressions about the deep significance of death
when it's the death of a convicted murderer.

Certainly, as Sept. 11 approaches, the idea of revenge is in the air, as are
questions about it. Is vengeance the way of nations? Was it worth it? What
is the difference between revenge and justice? Does violence merely beget
violence? Greenwald, in the same post cited above makes the connection to
the American cheering that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden. ("In all
cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and
wrong.")

Greenwald also cites Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News, who believes
he saw the national sentiment that Perry tapped into. Bunch calls the death
penalty cheer "a shocking new low" in American politics. On Thursday he
wrote: "[W]ith the 10th anniversary of 9/11 just four days away, everyone's
been looking for a window into America's post-attack psyche. I think that,
sadly, that window just opened wide in Simi Valley last night. I've never
forgiven my own newspaper, the Daily News, for leading the Sept. 12, 2001,
paper with an editorial headlined 'Blood for blood' that started out:
'Revenge. Hold that thought.' Obviously, we have - for coming up on a
decade. The cheering of executions is the hallmark of a sick society one
that's incapable of tackling its real demons and looking for vengeance on
whomever happens to be available."

Given the tension in the air, and the 2012 election hovering, it's not
likely that the warring parties will come together on this or any other
issue. But who knows? Maybe we'll all wake up one morning and see the world
differently. It's happened before.

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Regards,
Claude Everett
"Labor is prior to and independent of
capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if

labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration."
Abraham Lincoln,
Congressional address 1861

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