I’ve been known to mock other nations – and many American states – when they prove themselves to be comically incompetent. The USSR tried an economic system currently being proposed by dimwits in the DSA wing of the Democrat party…and they end up with mostly empty stores.
“Welcome to State Shoe Store. Would you like shoe? Don’t bother to say size or color. We have brown shoe, all size 13, and many pairs with only left shoe.”
Or they steal some nuke plant plans from us, then read them upside down, annnnnddddd… Chernobyl!
Or the Chicoms try to copy Amazon. Annnnnnddddd…Temu!
Or Venezuela sits atop tons of oil, so their commies take over and nationalize it so that the Party can profit from it. Annnnnddddddd…everything breaks, and no one knows how to fix it, because you ran off all the smart people.
It’s especially fun to mock our own home-grown incompetents.
Hey, did you hear Mamdani is going to control rents and provide state-run grocery stores? Annnnnnddddd… rents have gone through the roof, and each grocery store will cost $30 million. And the closest thing they’ll have to fresh vegetables is brown shoes. All size 13.
Ooh, Gavin’s bringing magical high-speed rail to California! Annnnnddddd…we’re $20 billion in, and the first rail of track is set to be laid when Gavin’s youngest grandchild graduates with a BA in Grievance Studies in the spring of 2045.
But today is a sad day when I must mock the people in one of my favorite red states. And you probably know what I’m going to say.
Tennessee, come on! How hard is it to kill a sadistic, 50-year-old murderess?!
I mean, she’s not the armed, energetic 18-year-old she was when she slashed and stabbed and tortured her poor victim. She’s 50, and she’s strapped to a table, and you’ve got her outnumbered.
Seriously! You guys proved yourselves adept at killing Redcoats at Boyd’s Creek and King’s Mountain – and that was in the 1770s, and all you had was muskets! And you were picking off Yankees from 200-300 yards… in the 1860s! C’mon man.
Sure, maybe the problem was that we let a bunch of inexperienced female executioners do the job…A Sexist Would Say! (And by the way, is there anything that DEI can not screw up? Asking for a less p.c. friend.)
How did that work, exactly? I’m guessing that women generally have the good sense not to volunteer to be executioners. But then this murderer asked for an all-female death squad, so…what? The prison officials looked around, realized that they have no female executioners, and then went to the local Job Corps office and asked if any women there wanted to give the chemicals a go?
On the one hand, I’m not totally shocked they found a few takers. If the women knew what this murderer did to end up on Death Row – lured a young girl into the woods with two creepy accomplices, and then spent a lot of time cutting and torturing her – I expect that some of them wouldn’t be opposed to a little sisterly justice.
On the other hand, are we really letting killers choose their own executioners now? I’ve always thought letting them order their last meal was a weird ritual, but at least that seems to be a harmless, quasi-chivalrous gesture, like giving a condemned man a cigarette before putting the blindfold on him. (Or giving him a blindfold, for that matter.)
But letting her pick her own executioner? What did they expect? She’s looking at Mike, the regular executioner – he’s a Marine with unit tattoos and a scar through one eyebrow, who did tours in Fallujah and Afghanistan, and has already done four previous executions (so this one will make him an ace!).
Then she looks at near-sighted Janice from the cafeteria, Louise from HR, with carpal-tunnel and braces on both wrists, and Mildred, the short-timer with the trembling from Parkinson’s who’s about to retire from her supervisory job on disability at the end of the year. So she rolls the dice, and comes up with a crew who couldn’t hit a vein if they had a basket full of needles in a room full of veins.
The whole debacle reminds me of dark humor about the best kind of doctor to be: a coroner. Because even if you completely screw up an autopsy, what’s the worst that can happen? The guy comes back to life?
Except in this case, the humor is even darker. What’s the worst kind of botched execution? The kind where the murderer survives…twice!
This whole topic might make you feel queasy, and I wouldn’t blame you. I can joke about it only because if I can’t laugh, I’d have to cry. It’s obviously a morally fraught thing to execute someone, and I can respect some arguments on both sides. But ultimately, the deciding factor for me is that giving our worst predators anything less than the death penalty undervalues the precious life they took.
Add to that our society’s growing embrace of toxic empathy – wherein we care much more about the criminals than their victims, and are so lenient with criminals that they can eventually victimize more innocent people – and I think that capital punishment is a necessary response.
Unfortunately, the story of this botched execution is taking the attention away from the particularly gruesome and cruel murder that earned Christa Pike a date with the executioner. (If you haven’t read the details and don’t have a strong stomach, don’t.) And when marginalizing and even erasing her victim turns Pike into a sympathetic figure, it plays right into the hands of the left.
They’ve already been making tons of bad-faith arguments against killing anyone – other than Trump, Charlie Kirk, Jews, or the unborn, of course – for the better part of a century. They’ve objected to every method of capital punishment. They said that hanging and firing squads were archaic and cruel, so we went to the new-fangled electric chair. But a few of those went wrong – some knucklehead used the wrong kind of sponges, or didn’t make sure they were wet, or mixed up the black and white wires. So we went to lethal injection – the killer goes gently to sleep, and then stops their bothersome breathing.
Annnnddddd…Tennessee!
You guys might have just given our opponents one more objection. I’m afraid that the end result of this mess might be that we go back to our usual method of ushering our worst criminals to their eternal reward:
Death by old age.
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