With Liberty and Termination With Extreme Prejudice For All

2016 was a watershed in human history. It was the moment, beginning with the Trump presidency, when humanistic people, opposed to the death penalty, wished their opponents would drop dead. It started with Donald Trump and Retrumplicanism itself and then fanned out to the former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo who glibly responded “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” when asked by a Fox reporter if the State Department would work with Biden on the transfer of power. Once you cross the line, murder is no longer an obstacle. There's a serial killer in all of us. Should Vladimir Putin be hung in public like Mussolini? Should he be administered a dose of Novichok, the poison used in the attempt to assassinate Navalny? Murderous feelings are like the BA2 form of Covid-19, ie highly contagious. Naturally neither Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sees free speech as the right to stalk Parkland survivor David Hogg, nor her two partners in crime, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert would elicit much sympathy amongst many death penalty foes if they were to use an old CIA expression “terminated with extreme prejudice.” Is this a sad commentary? There once was a time when civilized debate was a sacred and joyous activity. Kellyanne Conway’s husband George, a Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump Super Pac, was the kind of person with whom a progressive might enjoy civilized discourse. Ditto William Cohen, a former Republican senator and congressman who was Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton. You didn’t have fantasies about killing Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was Republican governor of California. Nixon, maybe. What happened? 

read "The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "(I'm) a Roadrunner" by Junior Walker & The All Stars