“We may have made a mistake in sending the memo out, but it’s no mistake to say that if a ballot is illegal, it should be disqualified. It might help for me to go down there. They won’t expect a one-legged Vietnam veteran Medal of Honor winner to argue that a ballot that’s two weeks late should be disqualified. It’s bullshit to say otherwise. That’s one thing you learn in the military—you take responsibility for your actions, you follow orders, and even if you don’t know the rules, you can be court-martialed for not following them.” – from Jake Tapper’s book, “Down And Dirty,” where he reports on a phone conversation between Bob Kerrey and Al Gore during the Florida electoral crisis. I like particularly the notion that “even if you don’t know the rules, you can be court-martialed for not following them.” In fact, as longtime readers may recall, I agreed with Kerrey on the military ballots. But it’s a little rich for him to be a hard-ass when soldiers get their ballot applications wrong and forgiving when they, i.e. he, might have committed a war-crime.
CATHOLICS AND DEATH: Some of you have pointed out (see “PRO-DEATH CATHOLICS” below) that opposition to the death penalty does not have the same binding force as opposition to abortion or homosexual sex. They argue that the Church has ruled that every abortion and same-sex sexual act is wrong but that the death penalty can sometimes be right. My question is: if the current Pope says the execution of McVeigh, an unrepentant mass murderer of civilians, is not moral, then what execution could be? I think the gist of John Paul II’s teaching is that the death penalty is always profoundly wrong. Or, in his formulation, that the examples in modern societies where it is justified are practically non-existent.
The Dish 