The Week USA - August 17, 2019

“Half of all marriages end in

divorce—and then there are

the really unhappy ones.”

Comedian Joan Rivers, quoted

in OprahMag.com

“Be regular and orderly in

your life, like a bourgeois,

so that you may be violent

and original in your work.”

Novelist Gustave Flaubert,

quoted in The Wall

Street Journal

“I love America more than

any other country in this

world, and, exactly for this

reason, I insist on the right

to criticize her perpetually.”

Author James Baldwin,

quoted in CNN.com

“The main dangers in this

life are the people who

want to change every-

thing—or nothing.”

American-British politician Nancy

Astor, quoted in Forbes.com

“A little rebellion now

and then is a good thing,

and as necessary in the

political world as storms

in the physical.”

Thomas Jefferson,

quoted in the Portland, Maine,

Press Herald

“Knowing what must be

done does away with fear.”

Activist Rosa Parks, quoted

in the Willmar, Minn., West

Central Tribune

“If things were simple,

word would have

gotten around.”

Philosopher Jacques Derrida,

quoted in TheBrowser.com

Talking points

Wit &

Wisdom

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NEWS 17

Poll watch

Q51% of voters think

President Trump is racist,

while 45% do not. 60% do

not think Congress should

begin impeachment pro-

ceedings against Trump.

Still, 52% of voters say

Trump tried to “derail or

obstruct” Robert Muel-

ler’s investigation, and

56% think that the Mueller

report did not exonerate

Trump. 71% of American

voters are concerned that

a foreign government

may interfere in the 2020

elections.

Quinnipiac University

Death penalty: Why Barr wants executions

“Anyone who has witnessed

the steady rise of Trump, with

the thumbs-up-thumbs-down

swagger of an omnipotent

Roman emperor,” knew this

day was coming, said Will

Bunch in The Philadelphia

Inquirer. Attorney General

William Barr announced last

week that the Justice Depart-

ment has canceled an unoffi-

cial, 16-year-long moratorium

on executing federal prisoners and will put five

inmates to death in December and January. To

proactively defend against charges of racial dis-

crimination, Barr selected carefully: Three of the

five inmates are white, and all murdered minors.

But that doesn’t change the fact that capital pun-

ishment has been proved to be racially discrimina-

tory and can lead to the innocent being executed.

In recent decades, 156 death row inmates have

been exonerated by DNA testing or other evi-

dence. So why bring back executions now? As is

so often the case with our Caligula-like president,

“the cruelty is the point.” It thrills his base.

There is nothing wrong with executing “the

worst of the worst,” said criminal law professor

Robert Blecker in FoxNews.com. As Barr pointed

out, Congress passed legislation to reinstate the

federal death penalty in 1988 and it was signed

by the president, yet only three people have been

executed since then—and

none since 2003. “We owe

it to the victims and their

families to carry forward

the sentence imposed by our

justice system,” Barr said.

Some people commit crimes

so awful that “as a society,

we have an obligation to

kill them.” Oklahoma City

bomber Timothy McVeigh

was executed in 2001 for

setting a bomb that killed 168 people, including

children at a day-care center. Did he not deserve

to die? How about “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—who

placed a bomb next to a child at the finish line of

the Boston Marathon?” He deserves to die, too.

Barr’s order to resume executions will probably

be delayed, said Garrett Epps in TheAtlantic

.com. For one, the government may not be able

to obtain the pentobarbital sodium it says it

will use to conduct the executions. The larg-

est manufacturer of the drug banned its sale for

capital punishment eight years ago. And federal

defender offices will provide the condemned with

vigorous appeals that could go on for months. A

delay won’t trouble Barr, said Andrew Cohen in

RollingStone.com. What he and Trump want is a

death penalty debate during the 2020 election, to

distract everyone from “the administration’s mal-

feasance and the president’s own legal troubles.”

At one time, Robert Mueller’s damning congres-

sional testimony would have brought the country

“to a grinding halt,” said Adam Serwer in The

Atlantic.com. Instead, the press joined Trump and

his defenders in declaring last week’s hearings a

dud. Supposedly, “the optics” were bad because

Mueller sounded tired and his deliberately worded

answers were “boring.” But why are we judging

Mueller by Trump’s “reality show standards?” The

substance of his testimony was devastating: Muel-

ler confirmed that Trump encouraged and ben-

efited from Russian election interference in 2016

and eagerly exploited documents illegally stolen

by Russian hackers. Once in office, Trump and his

subordinates lied repeatedly to cover up their doz-

ens of conversations and meetings with Russians,

with the president trying to fire Mueller, ordering

aides to lie, and actively attempting to derail an

investigation into an “attack on American democ-

racy.” In effect, Mueller told Americans that “the

president is a crook.” And yet the takeaway is that

a 74-year-old man looked kind of old?

Face it, Mueller fizzled, said Rich Lowry in

National Review.com. Democrats and the media

built up Mueller’s testimony as the second coming

of the Watergate hearings. But Mueller didn’t tell

us much of anything that wasn’t already in his ini-

tial report. And instead of making the political case

against Trump for themselves, Democrats have

been using Mueller as a “crutch,” hoping that he

would someday deliver a coup de grâce against

Trump. It’s “not the job of a special counsel, who

under the regulations is supposed to act like a typi-

cal U.S. attorney, to give a dramatic, passionate,

ratings-grabbing TV rendition of his work.”

Mueller handled his testimony—and the entire

investigation—like the cautious conservative he

truly is, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com,

and Republicans used that against him. Mueller

tried to “place himself above the fray, by refus-

ing to call a crime a crime or to recommend

impeachment.” That allowed Attorney General

William Barr “to mischaracterize his findings”

and emboldened Republicans to dismiss “all the

damning facts he produced” as partisan smears.

Mueller deserves more credit than he’s gotten, said

Andrew Egger in TheBulwark.com. Instead of the

“Trump-deranged witch-hunter” or a “messianic,

giant-slaying #Resistance hero,” he proved himself

a dedicated public servant who delivered the facts

without grandstanding. “Don’t blame him if we

can’t handle the rest.”

Mueller: Was his testimony a dud?

Barr: ‘We owe it to the victims.’