Just when you thought that Trump could not sink any lower in the human degradation scale, he is now, a lame duck president rushing to kill judicially as many death row inmates as his federal powers allow him. The fact that no lame duck president has sanctioned judicial killing for over a century is of course not a deterrent to this sick joke of an incumbent. Trump knows (I assume, though that is an assumption which credits Trump with a little too much knowledge or interest) that Biden is an abolitionist as far as capital punishment is concerned and so he is deliberately taunting the president-elect with a fatally childish display of time-limited residual power.
I had thought that I was inured to shock from the antics of the most powerful man in the world, but as always, Trump confounds what you thought were the profoundest depths of his depravity. In a way there is a certain consistency in his approach; his mismanagement of the response to the Covid catastrophe in the USA though his light touch indolence was at the expense of the death of Others, and his display of judicial slaughter is also at the expense of Others. His presidency has been marked by misery and death, but he has survived and prospered, and that of course shows that he has been right all along.
To use lethal injection or whatever barbaric means capital punishment is administered in the USA as a sign of your own power is disgusting and is a travesty of justice. I do feel for the victims of the actions of those on Death Row, but judicial murder can never compensate for another death.
Meanwhile our own pale reflection of Trump parades on the international stage as if he has a shred of credibility. Marina Hyde summed it up beautifully in today’s Guardian:
“Received wisdom seems to be that this is all theatre – designed to show that the UK, which has rapidly ceased to be a serious country, is serious about its threats. If there is a flaw to this plan – and really, it’s such a tiny cavil – it’s that our prime minister is a liar of international repute. Possibly even intergalactic. For Boris Johnson, lying is not second nature: it is nature. Even on the occasions he wants to tell the truth – a rarity, but imagine it momentarily aligning with his self-interest – he has to make a vast, almost physical effort to override his psychiatric biology. It’s like watching a cat try to bring up a six-kilo hairball.”
Do read the rest of her piece in The Guardian, and indeed anything else she writes, it is one way to stay sane! The link is here:
And it rained today as well. It’s just one damn thing after another!
