Off with their heads

So people talk about Massachusetts liberals as though they’re the very worst kind, and by extension that there’s no place more liberal than Massachusetts. As a Canadian, I find this funny. Particularly when the (Republican) governor is now talking about bringing back the death penalty:

Massachusetts can create a capital punishment system that is as infallible as humanly possible by narrowly defining the eligible crimes and requiring the use of DNA or other scientific evidence, according to a report that will be released today by a panel appointed by Governor Mitt Romney.

There’s a couple of points to make here. First of all, I’m not sure how reducing the number of crimes that can warrant the death penalty will increase its infallibility except perhaps in a purely statistical sense: the fewer such crimes there are, the fewer people the State will put to death and hence the fewer innocent people the State will put to death. This is assuming probabilistic independence, which may or may not be valid.

A far more significant concern, though, is the mutilation of the sense of infallible that’s going on here. Infallible is an absolute: either you is or you ain’t. You can sort of justify using terms like mostly infallible, if you really try, but as infallible as humanly possible? What the hell does that mean?

Of course, this is Massachusetts we’re talking about here, home of such prominent Catholic politicians as JFK and JFK2, so from a strict Catholic perspective as infallible as humanly possible is logically equivalent to infallible, since the Pope is human and (at least on certain matters) infallible. QED. If one wants to take a more humanistic stance, then as infallible as humanly possible must mean fallible, since nobody’s perfect.

So in other words: a commission is proposing bringing back the death penalty in Massachusetts and is trying to sell it on its fallibility. It’s pronouncements like this that remind me why I’m never, ever likely to become a politician.