Disappointing Leadership

There is no doubt that I've lost a little fire in the belly. I used to eat, breathe, and drink politics. Culminating in 2004, when I gave 30 hours a week to Howard Dean, received the Democratic Nomination for State Assembly, and was writing like a mad man about local politics, I trailed off dramatically.

Scuba gets blamed for much of it. But so does the disastrous campaign of John Kerry and the ridiculous dearth of principled leadership in partisan politics. The mayor of Los Angeles whores for the cameras more than the governor of New York likes whores. The speaker of the California assembly hands our golden parachutes to public employees while the former governor of New Jersey basks in golden showers.

Today I was reminded of one of those moments when my faith in politics was chipped away at just a little. Gov. George Ryan, the Republican Governor of Illinois, halted all state executions and finally commuted the sentences of every person on the Illinois' death row. He said he did it because the justice system has demonstrated that it is not fool-proof and we certainly can't take a human life based on the processes of a broken system. He pointed to things like more than 100 death row inmates have later been exonerated through infallible evidence post-conviction but prior to execution. A jury of your peers is not omniscient.

But maybe, just maybe, Gov. Ryan was trying to shield himself from the scrutiny of this:

Click here and listen to this little story.

Thanks, Paul, for reminding me not to get to excited about the presidential race because I'll likely end up disappointed again.




http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16182655