Ultimate Justice

Two chilling moments in the past two Republican debates:

1. Audience members, last Wednesday, cheer at the mention of the more than two-hundred individuals who been executed in Governor Rick Perry's Texas. Anyone who's followed the Cameron Todd Willingham case knows how flawed the death penalty system is in that state.

2. Audience members, last night, cheer and say "Yes!" as Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul if society should let an uninsured 30-year-old man in a coma die. (To his credit, Paul responded that charities should step in and cover his costs).

I'm trying to understand this lack of compassion. I hope for President Obama's re-election in 2012, but I know he's vulnerable. If it's not him, I hope for a President Romney or Huntsman, someone who won't fan the flames of blood lust.

Andrew Sullivan (a Reagan conservative) put it best at the end of one of his posts yesterday about the current state of the Republican Party:

If you ask why I remain such a strong Obama supporter, it is because I see him as that rare individual able to withstand the zeal without becoming a zealot in response, and to overcome the recklessness of pure religious ideology with pragmatism, civility and reason. That's why they fear and loathe him. Not because his policies are not theirs'. But because his temperament is their nemesis. If he defeats them next year, they will break, because their beliefs are so brittle, but will then reform, along Huntsman-style lines. If they defeat him, I fear we will no longer be participating in a civil conversation, however fraught, but in a civil war.