Rick Perry: The Man Behind the Mask

Robert Quinn
OpEd News
September 13, 2011

We know there are people on the job doing everything they can to protect America from terrorists. Who’s going to protect America from Rick Perry should he become the next president of the United States?

Statistically, in the past 5 years you were:

- 1,052 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a terror attack.

- 202 times more likely to die in a building fire than be killed in a terrorist attack.

- 25 times more likely to drown in a bathtub than be killed in a terror attack.

- 3.64 times more likely to be hit and killed by a lightning bolt than killed in a terrorist attack.

And if you happen to live in Governor Rick Perry’s Texas, in the last 5 years you were 108 times more likely to be executed by Gov. Perry than you were to be killed in a terrorist attack.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The terrorist threat pales in significance in the face of the threat Rick Perry poses. Rick Perry is a very dangerous man.

In the whole of the South there have been 1266 executions in the last 35 years. Texas alone accounts for 442 of these executions, of which 234 were on Governor Perry’s watch. Comparatively, there have been 4 executions in the whole of the Northeast.

All Southern states, without exception, have a death penalty statute. Only 2 Northeastern states have a death penalty statute. Yet the murder rate in death penalty states (the South) is nearly 2X what it is in states without the death penalty (the Northeast). So either the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to murder or those who live in the South are inherently more violent than those who live in the Northeast. Whatever the case, I have 3 things to say to Rick Perry, and to those who support his candidacy for president:

1) Every murderer believes that his actions are justified. At the moment of taking another’s life he believes that the person being killed deserves to die. How is this any different than state-sanctioned executions? Murder in the name of putting an end to murder is still murder.

2) Even if I were to be persuaded that state-sanctioned executions differ in important ways from non-state-sanctioned executions, the fact remains that state-sanctioned executions are not an effective deterrent to murder.

3) Even if state-sanctioned executions were an effective deterrent to murder, the execution of even one innocent man or woman is one too many.

Who knows how many innocent victims of the death penalty there have been? Since 1992, newly available DNA evidence has exonerated 15 death row inmates. Unfortunately, DNA evidence is available in only a small fraction of the cases that carry the death penalty.

Rick Perry doesn’t seem to be bothered by any of this. And I can’t help but wonder how else Rick Perry’s killer instinct might manifest if he were to become our next president. Does America really need another gun-slinging Texan, another sociopathic cowboy, another man without a conscience swaggering into the oval office and onto the world stage? We deserve better than this. The world deserves better than this. Now, more than ever, America’s presidency is in need of a genuine man or woman of peace who is both able and willing to lead our country in a radically new direction.

See original article here

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This article was posted: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:30 am

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