Never one to miss an opportunity to interject
divisive race talk into a discussion, on May 2, 2014 during a press conference
with Angela Merkel, Barack Obama commented on the so-called “botched” execution
of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett saying
… in the application
of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems —
racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in
which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have
been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise
significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. And this
situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems
there.
So I’ll be discussing
with Eric Holder and others, you know — you know, to get me an analysis of what
steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly
in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult
and profound questions around these issues.
Since Obama made “racial bias” his keystone issue, let’s think about the
role of race concerning Clayton Lockett’s crime. Race was a factor in that Lockett was black
and Stephanie Neiman, his murdered victim, was white but, of course, black on
white violence never qualifies as a race crime, at least not to Barack Obamas
of the world. We also can consider the
“brutality” of the botched execution.
According to eye witnesses, Lockett’s foot kicked, his body bucked, his
head rolled side-to-side, and his teeth clenched. He died of an apparent heart attack [the
single most common cause of death in the United States] after one of his veins
“blew.”
As is always true with executions, there were witnesses present, 12
including one of Lockett’s lawyers. Does
this sound like the kind of situation wherein someone deliberately would try to torture the convicted murderer?
What about Clayton Lockett’s murder victim, Stephanie Neiman? According
to Mike Hashimoto of dallasnews.com,
On June 3, 1999,
Stephanie was driving a friend home in her Chevy pickup and had the misfortune
of arriving when three men were there, supposedly attempting to beat a debt out
of Bobby Bornt, 23, who lived there with his 9-month-old son.
One man hit
Stephanie’s friend with a shotgun and forced her to call Stephanie inside. The
men then raped the friend and beat Stephanie, when she refused to give up her
truck keys. They bound her with duct tape and drove her to a country road.
Still, she refused to
say she wouldn’t call the police on them, so they forced her to her knees and
made her watch one gunman dig a grave. When one man shot her, his gun jammed,
while Stephanie screamed. The man cleared his weapon and shot her again.
Even though she was
still breathing, the man ordered his accomplices to bury her, which they did.
It’s not clear whether
it took 43 minutes more for her to die, and we can’t ask her now if she
suffered.
Was it torture to bury someone alive?
Is that worse that waterboarding a terrorist?
Barack Obama can excuse his administration for “botching” the security of
the Libyan embassy that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. He also can excuse the fact that his people
failed to launch a rescue attempt. No one
was culpable in Benghazi since race was not an issue. No one lost his/her job. Victoria Nuland, State Department
spokesperson during Benghazi, actually was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs and is credited with having a February 2014 diplomatic phone
conversation at which time she said, “Fuck the EU.”
If Clayton Lockett had been white, Obama would not have had his keystone
racial issue to motivate his desire for an investigation. He would not have said a single word about
the execution. In fact, Barack even
admitted during the aforementioned press conference that in some crimes the “death
penalty may be appropriate.” So this is
not really about the death penalty, it simply is about race and political
partisanship.
You see the President in particular and the Democrats in general are
panicking about the upcoming general election.
They are apoplectic about possibly losing the Senate. Take a close look at their rhetoric and you
will see that they are trying to “energize their voting base” and nothing does that as well as race talk, no matter how damaging it is to the
welfare of America as a whole.
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