Last week I posted the “quote of the month”. But, like everything else here, I suppose regularity is not a strong point. It’s tough to know when I might stumble across something worth mentioning. I ran into a couple of items recently that I thought were worth noting, even though it hasn’t been a month since the last “quote of the month”. Maybe that makes these “quotes of the week”. I don’t know if that makes them less worthy, although they are somewhat more depressing.
The first was from David Protess, a journalism professer at Northwestern University, who was quoted in Bob Herbert’s recent NY Times op-ed saying: “Seniors in college should not be the last line of defense against an innocent person being executed.” Dr. Protess leads Northwestern’s Innocence Project, which has been responsible for freeing innocent men from Death Row. His students, and groups like them around the country, are doing a wonderful job discovering the errors that have resulted in innocent defendants being wrongfully sentenced to death. The good news is they’re freeing innocent people. The bad news is that innocent people were convicted in the first place, and the justice system failed to do its job. Dr. Protess is right; innocent people shouldn’t have to rely on college seniors to keep them from being executed.
The next quote came from Nicholas Kristof’s column about Howard Dean’s candidacy. I really have a hard time swallowing the theory that Dean is an idealistic but unelectable candidate. In my opinion, Kucinich is the idealist; Dean is the barely tolerable compromise we may have to accept to beat Bush. But I’ll have to admit that he’s correct that Dean, or anybody else with an IQ above double-digits, is going to have a tough time winning the hearts of our dumbed-down voters. (I deliberately didn’t say hearts and minds, because the minds don’t exist). Kirstof quoted Adlai Stevenson’s reply to a supporter who shouted that he had the votes of all thinking Americans. Stevenson shouted back saying that wasn’t enough: “I need a majority”.