Notre Dame Hypocrisy

I have not said too much about the continuing swirl of protests from the pedophile priest loving set at Notre Dame University that has its panties in a knot over Barack Obama's selection as the commencement speaker this year. These folk who worry only about children before they are born continue to brown nose and ass kiss the members of the Church hierarchy who deliberately covered up sexual abuse of minors and callously reassigned predator priests to new parishes. Equally bad, these folks had no apparent problem with welcoming the Chimperator to the campus even though the Catholic Church in theory opposes the death penalty which Bush authorized more than any other governor. At times I truly wonder how these Catholics got their heads so far up their own backsides that they cannot see the hypocrisy in their double standards. What is shocking about the Chimperator - as is brought out in a New York Review of Books column - is just how little he carried about those he was sending to to be executed. Or maybe it's not shocking coming from the man who took the nation to war in Iraq based on lies and who has responsibility on his hands for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians. Here are some column highlights:

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In the twenty-first century, a state governor represents the last vestige of the "divine right of kings," because he has absolute power over life and death—especially when such power is entrusted to politicians motivated more by expediency than by conscience. . . . All governors claim to agonize over death penalty decisions. All claim to scrutinize every possible angle of the cases of condemned persons facing execution under their watch.

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George W. Bush during his six years as governor of Texas presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. Bush has said: "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully.... Each case is major because each case is life or death."

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He might have succeeded in bequeathing to history this image of himself as a scrupulously fair-minded governor if the journalist Alan Berlow had not used the Public Information Act to gain access to fifty-seven confidential death penalty memos that Bush's legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, whom President Bush has recently nominated to be attorney general of the United States, presented to him, usually on the very day of execution. The reports Gonzales presented could not be more cursory.
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Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. Washington's plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked "Deny"—just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.

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But Washington's plea for clemency raised substantial issues, which called for thoughtful, fair-minded consideration, not the least of which was the fact that Washington's mental handicap had never been presented to the jury that condemned him to death. Gonzales's legal summary, however, omitted any mention of Washington's mental limitations as well as the fact that his trial lawyer had failed to enlist the help of a mental health expert to testify on his client's behalf.

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When Berlow asked Gonzales directly whether Bush ever read the clemency petitions, he replied that he did so "from time to time." Instead, Bush seems to have relied on Gonzales's summaries, and they clearly indicate that Gonzales continuously sided with the prosecutors.

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Berlow writes, "The fact that courts have rejected a defendant's legal claims arguably places an added burden on a governor—as the conscience of the state...—to conduct a scrupulous review." How, then, could Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, systematically neglect to provide mitigating evidence or "new facts" that the petitioners' juries had never heard? For the man who said that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete [the Geneva conventions'] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners" and called the conventions "quaint" when issuing guidelines for the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, this is not surprising.

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There is more, but you get the drift. Bush uncaringly and irresponsibly deprived condemned individuals from having a chance to either prove their innocence or at least mitigating circumstances. Believe me, the more exposure I have to the trial process, the less faith I have in the court system. The outcome of a case is often a crap shoot and is decided more by the prejudices of the judge and/or jury than the true facts of the case.