The health problems of William Rehnquist pose an interesting question: which party’s base is more worried by the potential Supreme Court picks of the other side? I’d give it to Kerry’s base by a small margin. The news is breaking his way.
THE DRAFT SHENANIGANS: Josh Claybourne rightly bashes MTV’s campaign of scaring the bejeezus out of younger voters. Isn’t Kerry the candidate aiming to increase troop levels by 40,000?
BUSH, KERRY AND LIFE: Steve Chapman, perhaps the best libertarian columnist in the country (someone give him Safire’s job), joins the crew of new Kerry-backers. Here’s one point he makes that I think should be more salient for Catholics:
“The other big issue for ‘seamless garment’ pro-lifers like me, who reject the taking of human life except in self-defense, is the death penalty. There, Bush is proudly in favor of killing people to show that killing people is wrong.”
The Church hierarchy, of course, distinguishes between abortion and the death penalty. Abortion is always wrong. The death penalty is almost always wrong. The “almost” is very small – Rome has come extremely close to saying it is wrong in all cases, and certainly believes it should be restricted to a tiny number of cases where the alternative could be disastrous. Now compare that to Bush’s own record. He has signed more death warrants than almost any man in the country. As Texas governor, he showed absolutely no qualms about giving the nod to hundreds of deaths; in fact, he bragged about it. In one case, he even joked about it. He is far closer to the evil of the death penalty than Kerry is to the evil of abortion. And he has shown in his statements on the issue far more glibness than Kerry has ever revealed in the case of abortion. I should say: I think Kerry’s support for partial birth abortion and his extreme backing of everything the pro-choice movement wants is troubling. But Bush doesn’t get a free pass here. And I’d have more respect for pro-life, pro-Bush Catholics if they averred at least some discomfort with Bush’s ease with this particular culture of death.
The Dish 