In the category of dog-bites-man news items, I see that the Billy Bobs of Tennessee who love capital punishment are incapable of carrying out a death sentence to its intended conclusion. I had thought previously that the leading ghoulish detail in these sickening dramas pertained to the fulfillment of the condemned person’s last meal request, the details of which were always duly memorialized in press accounts. But the menu items have been displaced by the need to have an ambulance idling in the parking lot so that, when the bumblers bumble, their victim, having frustrated the executioners’ best efforts while strapped to a gurney, can be raced to the hospital for treatment. You must have to be a Christian moralist, Tennessee-style, to comprehend the logic of this.
Lincoln should just have let the South secede.
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