But I thought they were the law-and-order party?


Matt Bevin lost the election to the governorship of Kentucky, so in his last few weeks in power he has decided to throw a petty tantrum and release hordes of violent criminals from the prisons. That’ll teach those voters!

Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.

Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.

He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.

You know, Kentucky has very strict laws against possession of marijuana, so there are certainly a great many people in the prisons for that crime. Couldn’t he have released them, instead? I would think 428 potheads having parties at home would be far less of a threat to the citizenry than child rapists and murderers.

It’s become quite clear that when a Republican says they’re a law and order candidate they’re lying, just as much as when they claim to be True Christians™. The actual truth of the matter is that they’re just sadists who love the power to torment others.

Comments

  1. wzrd1 says

    What nonsense!
    Throughout the Trump impeachment process, the GOP disproved that bullshit in spades and illustriously displays it so.
    All must obey the Imperious Leader or doom shall fall.
    Or something.

    Seriously, under Trump, the GOP shed all notion of being for law and order and only for defeating anyone with darker shade skin than pure paper, never recycled.
    Now, under, not a civil war threat, but a swivel war, where everyone is supposed to shoot at everyone and magically, the military will support them and such is only impossible if they get their way.
    At least, that’s my reading of the far right BS train, largely fostered via a specific nation’s propaganda organs.
    One of which had a specifically anemic and amateurish effect on Quora, as to be rapidly spotted and accused, a few of us able to display TTP’s defectively followed and worse, links straight back to home, suggesting an information warfare school project over this weekend.

    I graded the student language attempts at D-, due to obvious transliteration errors that indicate the language error.
    The instructor, an F-, for allowing Russian URL’s to leak into the disinformation site.
    For those interested in their own research, the shite is…
    http://usatodaynews.live

    Enjoy a belly laugh.
    Then realize my nausea, far too many accept whatever is on the internet as factual.
    My wife even acquainted, with resistance, herself with one site, where the pyramids of Egypt were impossible without wheels or metal tools (copper in the BS didn’t exist, nor did bronze for later efforts), because rollers couldn’t exist.
    Or something.

    Hydrogen is common in the universe, as is idiocy.

  2. jrkrideau says

    The family of a man pardoned by Gov. Matt Bevin for a homicide and other crimes in a fatal 2014 Knox County home invasion raised $21,500 at a political fundraiser last year to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign.

    Well, at least Bevin pays his debts. American justice–the best money can buy?

  3. Artor says

    Of course Bevin wouldn’t release the non-violent pot smokers. They aren’t going to make trouble for his Democratic replacement.

  4. Howard Brazee says

    Republican leadership gave up on any pretense of believing in the Constitution and law even before Trump (Ask Garland). Trump just made it solid.

  5. says

    This was kind of implicit in the state of things from before 2016.

    Reagan was made possible by the refusal of Congress to prosecute all the criminals in Watergate. (Karl Rove was apparently one of those who could have been imprisoned but wasn’t!)

    George W. Bush was made possible by the unwillingness of Democrats to seriously prosecute Reagan and Bush for Iran-Contra, the S&L bailout, and so forth.

    When Obama refused to prosecute George W. Bush because “we have to look forward, not backward”, the rise (maybe not so soon, but eventually) of somebody like Trump was inevitable.

    It’s like a legal Overton window: Republicans push things towards criminality by committing blatant crimes, Democrats ensure things don’t go back to normal by refusing to prosecute. Then suddenly we’re in the soup, the law is meaningless, and all those who put us there by winking at blatantly illegal acts throw up their hands and say “not my fault, I didn’t commit any crimes myself”.

  6. says

    When Obama refused to prosecute George W. Bush because “we have to look forward, not backward”, the rise (maybe not so soon, but eventually) of somebody like Trump was inevitable.

    And right now there’s some wannabe dictator with more brains than Trump taking notes on how fucking easy it would be to take over.