THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Nothing liberals advocate ever WORKS. So no one is allowed to ask how many children's futures were ruined by their inability to read after phonics was abandoned in so many schools. People killed by repeat felons let out by liberal lawyers and judges don't count at all.

Liberals want an end to capital punishment for a very interesting reason. The death penalty is evil, they say, because innocent people get executed. The liberal rule when it comes to punishing murderers is that you can't have capital punishment unless it is perfect.

We could make a deal with them on this: No program will be adopted if it can cause permanent harm to people if it fails.

If anyone is executed who turns out to have been innocent, liberals say the damage is "permanent." Now, it doesn't matter if every single leftist program has failed and done permanent and horrendous damage to innocent people. Those honest people don't matter, because they are of no particular importance to liberals.

But repeat felons are one of the groups that leftists consider to be their special clients. Like minorities, they MATTER. If you do permanent harm to convicted felons, especially convicted felons who belong to a minority group, you are dealing with real people. They are not like children whose education is ruined, or people who are killed on the streets because repeat liberal judges release felons. Those don't count.

Another leftist idea that destroyed millions of lives was the anti-family propaganda of the women's lib movement of the 1970s. One of their mottoes was, "It is just as important to paint a picture as to have a baby."

They recommended that women concentrate on their careers, and that they learn to live alone. Within a couple of decades, women's libbers began to admit they had gone way too far. Hundreds of thousands of alone and lonely women were the result.

In the '90s, a lot of these libbers began to admit they had been too anti-family and anti-male. Once, and only once, I heard a conservative ask one of them how many lives their fanaticism had ruined. Needless to say, like all leftist errors, this one was ignored, and conservatives stopped asking such a heretical question.

So the rule on capital punishment is this: government can do anything to anybody, and make disastrous mistakes that kill and ruin lives, as long as they do it in the name of leftism. This is just an unfortunate result of social experiments. But there is a VERY IMPORTANT EXCEPTION to this rule. This exception applies to groups leftists care about. So if you are dealing with a repeat felon or a member of a minority group, all government action must be perfect.

What if we applied this rule to ALL government action? What if we considered innocent people who get mugged on the streets to be as human as repeat felons or minority groups? What if we decided that the education of children was important, too? In that case, what would happen to all those leftist "experiments" that never work?

There are mistakes that matter and there are mistakes that don't matter. When we freed tens of thousands of hardened felons to prey on citizens, the resulting slaughter was simply one of those slightly regrettable results of a glorious social experiment. But if you execute a single person who didn't do it, that is forever evil and inexcusable.

So let's make a deal with the liberals. We will abolish capital punishment if they will agree that, from now on, we should be as careful about ALL social experiments as liberals and respectable conservatives want to be about capital punishment.

Leftists cannot agree to this, and therefore respectable conservatives cannot agree to this. The reason liberals and their pet conservatives cannot agree to this is very simple. Capital punishment is usually applied to the RIGHT people, so there is an argument for it. But in the case of the left, NOTHING they recommend ever WORKS. The deal I am proposing would DESTROY the left.