It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Death" Is
With a touching lack of guile and without the slightest hint of irony, the wingnut intelligentsia takes time out from praising Ramesh Ponorru's new screed against the Democrats -- The Party of Death -- to bash the jury in the Zacharias Moussaoui trial for not giving the convicted 9/11 plotter....well, death.
Peggy "liberals-are-half-in-love-with-death" Noonan in particular waxes eloquent about the value of death:
It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life.
I see. We can't appreciate the value of life without the death penalty, is that it?
It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.Isn't the death penalty itself a "planned taking of a human life", Peggy?
Meanwhile, the National Review's John Podhoretz chimes in:
There is only one justifiable reason for a juror to make this choice. That juror has to believe the death penalty is wrong under any and all circumstances. To imagine that there can be any mitigating circumstance regarding Moussaoui's actual guilt is moral idiocy of the highest order.
Perhaps a greater moral idiocy is to assume you know what only the jurors themselves know. Perhaps they felt the death penalty was Moussaoui's ticket to martyrdom, and they didn't want to give it to him.
But never mind that. The wingers had already gone back to lauding Ponorru's book. Quoth convicted felon Chuck Colson: "This carefully researched and rigorously argued work skillfully rebuts the seductive arguments of America's merchants of death. Beautifully crafted, it is both enjoyable and profitable reading."
Profitable for Ponorru, anyway.
