The devil was kind enough to take time away from his busy schedule to sit down with me for a short discussion on Oklahoma’s hurry-up-and-kill-’em execution fiasco. Here’s the unedited transcript:
THE ERSTWHILE CONSERVATIVE: Thanks again for making time to talk about this important topic.
SATAN: No problem. I was here in your state anyway.
TEC: Oh, yeah? Why?
SATAN: I had some work to do in Jefferson City. Here, let me read to you what I got done yesterday: “Missouri senators have passed legislation that seeks to nullify some federal gun laws and punish federal agents who enforce them.” Isn’t that awesome? I’m pretty proud of that.
TEC: I bet it was hard to get—
SATAN: —Hard? Hardly. I thought it would take a real pro, which is why I came to Missouri, but it turned out that getting Republicans in your state to pass nullification legislation was so damned easy that I probably could have left it for them to do all by themselves. If we devils ever start thinking about starting another civil war, next to Texas Republicans, I can’t think of a more solid group of folks we could count on to fire the first shot.
TEC: That’s fascinating, but I really want to talk to you about that botched execution in Oklahoma on Tuesday.
SATAN: Botched? Did you say botched? It wasn’t botched, my man. The guy is dead, isn’t he? I checked myself and believe me, he’s dead. So Oklahoma didn’t botch a damn thing. They killed him as sure as I’m sitting here. In fact, they essentially tormented him before he had that heart attack, so I say kudos to Oklahoma! We should have more executions like that one! My only problem with what they did was they waited too long to close the blinds.
TEC: What do you mean?
SATAN: They waited 16 minutes. Look, people don’t need to know what their government is doing, especially when what their government is doing is so messy. When the government does good things like killing people, citizens shouldn’t be able to watch what is being done in their names. That’ll just make them a little squirmish about it all. Let’s say that this execution had been on television. (What a show that would have been!) People could have seen Clayton Lockett’s body struggle against the drugs he was given; they could have heard him moan and groan as he was writhing on the table. From my perspective, who wouldn’t want to see that? Forty-three minutes of sheer joy as far as I’m concerned. But I know what those do-goody liberals would do with those images. They’d make a big propaganda war against the death penalty and before you know it juicy killings like this one would stop. So, dammit, they should have closed those beige blinds sooner, or better yet, done it all behind closed doors.
TEC: But even if they couldn’t see what is going on, don’t people who support the death penalty just want it done humanely? Even for convicted killers like Clayton Lockett?
SATAN: Humanely? Are you kidding me? There ain’t no way for the state to kill someone humanely, son. However it’s done, it is killing plain and simple. And I love it. You can cut their heads off, hang ’em from a tree, shoot ’em in the heart, gas ’em, or you can stick needles in ’em and do it that way. I don’t care as long as death is the result. But there ain’t no such thing as the government humanely killing a prisoner, a guy they have locked up. All I’m saying is the stuff should be done out of sight of the public, lest the public start thinking, “Man, we tortured that guy like he tortured his victim. Aren’t we better than that?” You did know that Lockett put his 18-year-old victim through hell before he shot her and had her buried alive, right? And if the people start thinking that the state’s killing of Lockett looked more like revenge for his crimes than justice, then they might get all wobbly-kneed on the death penalty. And that would be a shame.
TEC: Well, I don’t know—
SATAN: And, look, besides all that, the truth is starting to seep out that more than 4% of people sentenced to death in America are actually innocent. I have a legion of demons assigned to the task of keeping that information from getting wide distribution to the public, because there ain’t nothing better than the state killing an innocent man! I get all goose-pimply just thinking about it. But it so happens that the latest study by liberal do-gooders came out in conjunction with the killing of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma (and don’t think demonic heads won’t roll over not preventing that). So, that makes it all the more disturbing that those damn officials in Oklahoma left the blinds open long enough so that those liberal journalists could write sensational stories about what went on in that prison death chamber and make a lot of noise about how “inhumane” killing a prisoner is. Now we’ve really got our work cut out for us, dammit!
TEC: I have one more—
SATAN: Sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’m due at a meeting with my top advisers on how to keep pushing the Benghazi scandal even when there is no evidence. ABC and Fox “News” here we come!