[QUOTE=BarnOwl]
It seems so simple and so obvious, I didn’t feel it needed mention.
Bush could have simply let the Board of Pardons and Paroles know that he thinks a defendant deserves a commutation and asks them for the requisite vote.
But no.
“I’m confident,” he said last February, “that every person that has been put to death in Texas under my watch has been guilty of the crime charged, and has had full access to the courts.”
What does “…full access to the courts” mean? In my book, a fair trial. And yet:
“The State of Texas is a national embarrassment in the area of indigent legal services,” a committee of the State Bar of Texas says in a report just approved. Again, Governor Bush has shown no concern about this reality. He vetoed a bill, passed by the legislature, that would have let Texas counties set up a limited public defender program for the poor.
Bush just doesn’t care. He took 152 lives and never lifted a finger to save one of them.
Then along comes 9/11 and Bush is so hot to go to war he sends our people in without body armor and their vehicles without armor. Many get killed or maimed because of it.
He prosecutes the whole war on the cheap so his rich buddies can get their tax cuts.
Bush doesn’t give a damn for those guys and gals doing the fighting - to say nothing of the innocent Iraqis who’ve suffered as well.
The man’s a monster, kiddo.
[/QUOTE]
I realize this is MPSIMS, and not GD. Yet you are advancing arguments, providing facts that you wish your reader to draw inferences from – inferences favorable to your proposed conclusions. In short, you are treating this as a debate. Because of this, I do not feel the use of MPSIMS as a forum should insulate you from the requirements of a debate.
If your thesis is that Bush’s support of the death penalty makes him a monster, I don’t agree. People who support the death penalty are wrong – as wrong as they can be. Yet they are not monsters – they are simply wrong. They are acting in good faith, as reasonably as they can; they are simply mistaken.
If your thesis is more narrow – that we may infer from his tenure as Texas governor that he supports the death penalty. I agree.
The problem was this: you suggested we infer from his failure to commute death sentences as Texas governor that he was morally bereft, especially given his faux “pardon” of Thanksgiving turkeys. Now that you’ve been shown that Texas governors don’t have that ability, rather than simply admit you made a mistake, you’ve danced around the issue, thrown up other attacks at Bush having nothing to do with Texas or turkeys, and refused to acknowledge that you’re moving the goalposts.
If your debate is that Bush, as a result of all his actions as President, or just as a result of Iraq war, is morally bereft, you certainly entitled to argue that; you’ll find a great deal of support on this board for that view. But it’s not where you started, and shifting the debate to that proposition now, after losing your original point, is not particularly useful, since most every reader of this thread is well-versed in the practice of rhetoric and can easily identify the tactic.
