In the last couple of weeks, Sleepy Joe Biden, after four years of blunders, missteps, and failures, capped his mediocre-at-best term in office with actions that guarantee his place in history at or near the bottom of the list of effective Presidents. Right next to his predecessor/successor…

I’m not going to get into my usual arguments of how dysfunctional our political system is. Nobody gives a f… gives a…… Nobody cares. Everybody’s perfectly happy with letting other people do their thinking for them.

But it bears noting that the Biden Administration is responsible for some of the worst decisions made in Washington since… Well, the previous four years, but that was as much Congress as it was the White House. Remember, the previous 4 years were the beginning of the COVID years, and I have serious problems with how both the Administration and Congress dealt with that crisis. Wasn’t too crazy about how the Biden Administration dealt with it, either…

I stand by my conviction that the previous Trump Administration made a grave mistake by negotiating with Afghanistan’s Taliban, effectively undermining the government we spent 20 years, thousands of American lives, and billions of tax dollars shoring up, but it was the Biden Administration alone that turned our exit from Afghanistan into Saigon 1975 Revisited. The Taliban met none of the conditions they had agreed to, yet the Biden Administration not only continued the exit process but accelerated it, throwing the process into turmoil and costing more American and allied lives, and the Taliban swept back into power as if the previous 20 years hadn’t happened. The sacrifices made and treasure spent over the previous 20 years was for nothing. Wasted lives, wasted money, just like Vietnam. Thanks mostly to Biden and his handlers.

Not that anybody’s ever going to be held accountable for it.

After months of promising he was going to let the legal process he trusted absolutely take its course, he turned around and pardoned his son for every wrongdoing he ever committed. Biden threw is own Justice Department under the bus, claiming unfair prosecution and political retribution – the identical claim made by the Trump camp about the ongoing prosecutions against him by the same Biden Justice Department. As I’ve said before – he’s a politician, so color me not surprised when promises are broken.

And now he’s commuted the sentences of something like 40 federal Death Row prisoners. Child killers, rapists – name it, every capital offense is represented on the list of convicted criminals he spared from a lethal injection.

A lot of people are upset, feel that he’s usurped the courts, denied justice to the families of their victims.

Oddly enough, I’m not so sure about that…

There’s a huge difference between a Pardon and a Commutation. A Pardon is an official forgiveness for wrongdoing – the pardoned person is free to go on and live their life as if they were never convicted of a crime. A Commuted sentence doesn’t erase the conviction, it means that the sentence delivered by the Court – in these cases, death – is changed to a “lesser” sentence: life without the possibility of parole.

So, he didn’t erase their convictions or unlock their cell doors the way he did for his son. These violent criminals are not getting out of prison. What he did was take the death penalty off the table. Now these convicts are going to spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars, with the release of death only at some point in their old age…

I don’t know if I could come up with a more cruel, more fitting punishment for a violent criminal than a true life sentence. Imagine: years and years of waking up each morning knowing you’ll always wake up in a cage because of what you did…

And it’s less expensive than actually putting them to death.

And from a philosophical standpoint, yes, I’m old-school in a lot of ways, but Medieval I’m not. Your mileage may vary, but the way I see it,the Death Penalty is revenge, not justice. State-sanctioned murder, and in cold blood at that. And I’m opposed to murder. By anybody.

Did you know that the Biblical Commandment is not “Thou shalt not kill?” The actual translation is closer to “Thou shalt not murder”…

So, being openly opposed to the Death Penalty for many years, Biden’s commutation of federal death sentences isn’t a huge stretch, although a politically risky one, which is why they waited until he was on his way out. Particularly knowing that the incoming Administration will have no compunction against offing its “enemies”…