the real enemy

No doubt you've heard by now that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's sentence for perjury.

In his statement about the commutation, Bush stated the following:

“I respect the jury’s verdict, but I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison."

30 months. It's not even three years for what, and I'm sure this will all be made clear in twenty years or so, amounts to one of the hugest crimes in American history. One wonders what sentence Bush might actually find suitable for someone who jeopardized national security resulting in the deaths of 3586 U.S. men and women and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Reading the news this morning, I remembered a story from Bush's years as governor of Texas.

You probably remember Karla Faye Tucker. She was the woman from Texas, who in 1983, killed two people with a pick ax and was subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection. While on death row, she became born-again and an icon of death penalty abolishment.

Almost ten years later, when it came time for her execution, she made a request to Governor Bush that her sentence be commuted. (This is exactly what Scooter Libby just got.) Remember here that a commutation is NOT a pardon. For Tucker a commutation of her sentence would NOT have meant she would get out of jail (though one wonders if anyone ever sat Bush down and explained the differences between commutation and pardon). It would have meant a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

And yet despite Karla Faye Tucker's request for commutation, and despite the vocal protests and pleas of everyone from Pat Robertson to Pope John Paul II, from Newt Gingrich to the United Nations, Bush was unrelenting in his quest to execute and signed off on her death warrant. (By the way, did you know that during his six years as governor of Texas, Bush oversaw over 152 executions? Pretty sure that's more than any other governor in history. Heckuva job Bushie!)

During the 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination, conservative talking head Tucker Carlson interviewed Governor Bush and asked him about the Karla Faye Tucker case. Here's what Carlson wrote about the interview:

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker.

"Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Karla Faye] Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'"

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

I must have looked shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.

This, my friends, is the innate depravity of our President. He mocked the pleas of a dying woman. He spat in the face of a woman who'd sought forgiveness. And this is also what our President thinks of you, Everyday American.

Let the bodies of our friends, children, parents, spouses pile up in Iraq. Let the poor suffer and drown in New Orleans. Let men and women in inner cities just trying to survive be given mandatory sentences for drug possession no matter how little. And let the rich and powerful cronies of this administration get off free of their crimes without even blinking.

This has got to end.

Here's a poem by Steve Scafidi that exemplifies my overall point. The crime and circumstances are not necesarily the issue here. Injustice is. Horror is.

To me, President Bush is the embodiment of both.


On the Death of Karla Faye Tucker

And why not celebrate the deaths of our enemies?

Achilles dragging the corpse of Hektor

through war fields of Troy

sang a lost and hymnal cadence of joy

I imagine that warmed the cold hearts of the gods

for love of blood and vengeance and victory

has always been a kind of prayer.

Dante among the souls

in hell's garden swooned to hear so many

tormented cries from the delicate blue mouths

of the damned and was full of sympathy at first

which was blasphemy and he learned

slowly to savor the terror

of sinners and learned compassion only

goes so far and then must end and turn to an ugliness

without end which is hell. And so the idea of heaven

must also be steeped in a cruelty

without end. Why not

then, celebrate the deaths of our enemies--

those who break into our lives without being asked,

to crush and to maim? For Texas just killed a woman

who took a pick ax for a while against

gravity and swung it

down into the curled body of another

woman trying to sleep--just to sleep--one night

and who begged after a while more to be killed

quicker and who was not. Why not

raise a drink and sing

when the murderer's arm swells up

darkly and the brain stops and her shining soul

plummets into whatever abyss her god invented

meticulously and patiently one night

raking over the coals

of His own--I suppose--mysterious

rages and childhood dementia and darkness old

as His gods which are the coals themselves twinkling

like starlight here in America where

what is commonly

unspeakable is frequently described--

a thing by which we might recognize ourselves. No,

I can't celebrate the death of Karla Faye Tucker

although I would like to. Although

I have tried.

So goodbye ax. Goodbye stars.

Goodbye gods we make to sanction who we are

but will not now admit--simple thugs of history

we are given today to alter somehow

for our own sake.

Even the bloody Achilles eventually

gave Hektor's body to Hektor's father at the gate.

Lord, I give you back your image and the myth

of benevolence and the illusion

You exist.

Karla Tucker was not my enemy.

Horror is. That common murderous evil bitch.

Steve Scafidi
from For Love of Common Words

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