The Associated Press’s answer is that the story must point out that during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration, executions “may have happened fast enough to have contributed to the spread of coronavirus at a federal death row facility in Indiana.”
Oh no, not the coronavirus! Those poor killers. The horror, the horror!
You will probably retort that nothing better could be expected from the Associated Press these days because the once respectable news service has lodged its head irretrievably in a place of fundamental darkness, from which it utters little but left-liberal propaganda. However, even by the lamentable standards of the Associated Press and wider progressive news distortion machine, it surely takes the cake to include a prune-faced piety about the pandemic in a story on Biden granting clemency to the worst imaginable killers.
The Associated Press was no worse than some others, such as CBS, ABC, and PBS, the last of which also included the fatuous factoid about the curse of the coronavirus on death row.
What they didn’t bother to give readers, at least not prominently, was a sample of the crimes committed by beneficiaries of Biden’s quasi-monarchical exercise of power. Unmentioned, for example, was Thomas Sanders, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl in 2010, shot her four times, and ended her life by slitting her throat a few days after forcing her to watch him murder her mother. Nor was there a reference to Jorge Avila-Torres sexually assaulting and murdering two little girls, one age 8 and one age 9, and strangling a 20-year-old woman four years later.
The crime details principally provided by many left-liberal news outlets were those of murders for which Biden did not grant clemency. These were by Dylann Roof, a white man who murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, Robert Bowers, also a white man, who killed 11 Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in 2018, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the terrorist bombers who killed people at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
What motivates a news outlet to give detail about offenses committed by those not receiving clemency, while steering clear of the horrors perpetrated by those who should, properly, be central to the story?
The obvious and correct answer is that the outlets in question are politically biased and uninterested in presenting salient facts so readers can form well-founded opinions of their own. They want, rather, to present only facts that support the Democrat in the White House because they are on his political team and want to justify his actions.
There is also a highly questionable assumption beneath both Biden’s commutation and the efforts to obscure relevant details while listing irrelevant ones. It is the left-wing belief that murder motivated by racial antipathy, such as those by Roof and Bowers, or for politico-religious reasons, such as that by Tsarnaev, are worse than murders motivated for financial gain or by depravities that do not fit neatly into a political or ideological framework.
Biden’s justification for his selection of 37 murderers for clemency while withholding it from three others was a mishmash of sketched principles immediately broken. He claimed to be convinced on the principle that the death penalty should not be used at the federal level, and yet the principle fell apart for high-profile cases everyone has heard of and which can be attributed to “isms,” racism and Islamist terrorism, by which our society is acutely afflicted or which it is fashionable for politicians to condemn loudest.
The concept of “hate crimes” is fundamentally bogus. Why is it less evil to beat or kill someone for their wallet than it is to beat or kill them for their race or religion? Why is it more forgivable to rape or slit the throat of a child simply because you are a monster than it is to shoot or bomb adults because you are a monster motivated by a primitive but identifiable belief system?
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It is a foul principle that minimizes the importance of some crimes of violence for the capricious reason that they are committed in pursuit of financial gain, or by members of a favored racial minority, or because the villain does not have a political or ideological motive.
In America right now, criminals are going unpunished because left-wing prosecutors blame supposed systemic evils in society rather than personal evil in perpetrators. And as a Christmas bonus, our president, who ran as a centrist but governed as a pawn of the Left, is granting clemency because the motives of 37 hideous killers were neither those that would bring him intense political condemnation nor within the categories that the Left most abhors.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
