Republicans ... are skeptical of everything the government does容xcept when it executes people.

[phantom power]

Of course we also see this priority system in govt budgets, where the business of war (also about killing people) is the only budget item off limits for "deficit reduction," but any govt program involving helping people is "fat that needs to be cut"

The current field of Republican contenders for president are hard at work to prove they don't. The best government, they insist, will leave you alone to repair your own ruptured kidney while your neighbors bring you casseroles and cigarettes. In recent weeks, leading Republicans have made plain they don't believe in government-run health care (lo, even unto death). They don't believe in inoculating children again HPV (lo, even unto death). They don't believe in government-run disaster relief (ditto, re death), the minimum wage, Social Security, or the Federal Reserve. There is nothing, it seems庸rom protecting civil rights to safeguarding the environment葉hat big government bureaucracies can't foul up.

But there is one exception: killing people. These same Republicans who are dubious of government's ability to do anything right have an apparently bottomless faith in the capital-justice system. Everything is broken in America, they claim容xcept the machinery of death.

...

The exonerations are not just in Texas but nationwide, and they reflect the pathology of a broken system, not the wonders of a system with the capacity to self-correct. When Rick Perry is claiming that the system "works," he is either suggesting that it is without flaw or that when it comes to African-Americans or criminals, a few mistakenly executed innocents are an acceptable price to pay.

If you believe, as do the GOP presidential frontrunners, that government bureaucracies lead inexorably to error, cover-up, and waste, then there is no better place to start looking than the capital punishment system, which sentences and executes defendants in ways that are sloppy, racist, and corrupt. At any rate, a government bureaucracy that oversees education or health care deserves a far higher degree of regard預nd far less sneering scrutiny葉han a government bureaucracy that administers careless death.

http://www.slate.com/id/2303922/pagenum/all/#p2