David McElroy

Have you met the new neighbors? They’re the ones who moved in next door with the 12-foot-tall rock concert speakers and the complete set of electric guitars and amps that make your bedroom windows rattle when they fire up each day at 5 a.m.

It wasn’t so bad when they were just papering the front of the house with old heavy metal posters, but things really turned odd when they set up the firing range in the side yard — where she does drunken target shooting with automatic weapons and he does nude interpretive dance with a parrot riding on his curly head. Cool, huh?

Isn’t this what paradise looks like for libertarians and anarchists? Don’t we want people to be able to do anything they want, just as long as they stay on their side of the property line? Well, yes and no. Let’s separate fact from hyperbole.

Most people assume that libertarians and anarchists want to live in a world with no rules. For some percentage of freedom lovers, that’s true. They don’t really care what anybody else does, just as long as they keep the weirdness on their own property. These folks don’t mind living in ugly, junky neighborhoods with people who have all sorts of weirdness going on in full view.

I’ve known quite a few people who claim to feel this way. I’m not one of them.

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A politician who goes out of his way to ignore the innocence of a man he’s about to execute gets nothing but contempt from me. The bloodthirsty supporters of the politician who cheer the idea that he’s an executioner — pointedly ignoring evidence that an innocent man was executed — deserve the same contempt. Meet Rick Perry and his supporters.

Todd Willingham was a troubled man from a troubled background in Texas. He drank too much. He had been known to hit his wife. He had a string of minor run-ins with the law. But when his house burned, he lost the only things that he had seemed to care about — his three children.

Fire investigators concluded that the fire must have been arson, based on guesses and assumptions. Willingham didn’t have any insurance, so there was no financial motive. Still, he was charged with murdering his three children.

At trial, prosecutors claimed he killed his kids simply because they were getting int he way of his drinking and partying, but there was no evidence of that. The only credible evidence against him was that two fire investigators said the fire was arson.

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I didn’t watch the big presidential speech about “creating jobs” last night. Frankly, I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of thing anymore. I just wait to read the reports in cold text. At least the written news reports have the kindness to take out the most dishonestly self-congratulatory words.

I’m curious whether there’s any honest person — of any political persuasion — who believes Barack Obama’s new plan to “create” jobs is anything other than a political maneuver to buy him more time between now and the election. I wonder whether any honest and rational person believes that it has any chance of creating net jobs.

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