(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian) The real infuriating part of this is how damn inevitable it was. From The Washington Post: I remember being in the hearing room when Hutchinson testified. This was an extraordinary young woman who didn't want to be there.
Not that she was reluctant to testify. Rather, she appeared to be someone who took a job with the federal government because she wanted to serve, but she found herself at the employee's canteen of a madhouse. The government's charges seem to be that she perjured herself when she told the committee what someone else had told her about the president going batshit in his government vehicle after being told he couldn't join the mob at the Capitol on January 6.
Hutchinson's account of what Ornato told her has gained credibility as the second administration has unfolded. Presidential tantrums are now a regular beat, and that's not counting the mother of all tantrums now ongoing in the Persian Gulf. This may not go anywhere except in the cobwebby depths of the president's mind.
But billable hours are billable hours, and Cassidy Hutchinson doesn't deserve those, either. There's something funny going on, " he said, "I can just feel it in the air"/He went to get the hangin' judge, but the hangin' judge was drunk. —Bob Dylan, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts." The last official public execution in the United States happened on August 14, 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. The hanged man was a 22-year old convicted rapist/murderer named Rainey Bethea.
The hangman was a former Louisville cop named Arthur Hash. The execution turned into a national event partly because the presiding sheriff was Florence Thompson, and a woman's presiding over an execution shook up gender roles in a profound way. Newspapers all over the country made a meal of it.
Eventually, Sheriff Thompson accepted Hash's offer to step in and pull the lever. Come the day of the execution, with the sheriff sitting in an automobile from which she couldn't see the scaffold, Hash showed up completely sockless drunk, so drunk that a deputy sheriff had to spring the trap and send Rainey Bethea off to glory. I mention this story to illustrate that there was a very good reason why the United States banned public executions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
