Tidbits From The Texecutioner's Compassionate Conservatism From Hell

12/7/00
As of 7:30pm EDT, December 7, 2000, 152 people have been executed during Bush's tenure as governor. This makes Texas Governor George W. Bush the most-killing Governor, in the history of the United States of America. Under the leadership of George W. Bush, Texas continues to rank dead last in virtually every social service area, yet first in executions. Texas has some of the poorest funded programs to help the mentally ill (who account for a good number of the prison population). Bush's response to this dead last ranking was to insist that the legislature pass a $5 billion tax cut.

In an interview, Bush ridiculed a death-row inmate for doing an interview with CNN broadcaster Larry King shortly before she was executed. "`Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, `don't kill me.'" In fact, during that Larry King-Faye Tucker exchange, Tucker never asked to be spared.

1/21/05
Sister Helen Prejean's 1993 book against the death penalty, Dead Man Walking, became a movie and even an opera. She said, "Honestly, it's hard to look at [Bush's] face on television because everything he says is so untruthful... He claimed Karla Faye Tucker's execution was a crushing weight on him and said, "God bless Karla Faye Tucker," and then, after she was executed, he mimicked her. I hate the way he uses religion. It's a sacrilege to me."

2/24/05
"I'm perfectly comfortable in telling you, our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity, and we resolve our disputes in a peaceful way," [Bush] said.

2/25/05
"A Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world... he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined... flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured... Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child. He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured... The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that [he] is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism... [he] was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again... [he] is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant."