You say yes, I say no

These lines from the ’67s Beatle’s song came to mind this last week as I watched the news — both state and national. In Virginia, when the word came down that President Trump might come to Jamestown to help Virginia celebrate 400 years of representative government, many Democrats announced that if he were to come, they would boycott.

In Washington, with the Mueller Report hearings, the Democrats saw proof of wrongdoing with the president. The Republicans saw it quite differently. They saw a man who appeared to have little knowledge of the investigation or even why charges were brought.

When President Obama was in office, he separated families at the borders and sent 5 million illegals back to their home countries. Now, however, with President Trump in office, these actions are evil.

If none of that strikes you as odd, maybe this headline will concern you:

Attorney General William Barr made the announcement on Thursday where he said the following criminals would be executed:

Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, murdered a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl. After robbing and shooting the victims with a stun gun, Lee covered their heads with plastic bags, sealed the bags with duct tape, weighed down each victim with rocks and threw the family of three into the Illinois bayou.

Lezmond Mitchell stabbed to death a 63-year-old grandmother and forced her 9-year-old granddaughter to sit beside her lifeless body for a 30 to 40-mile drive. Mitchell then slit the girl’s throat twice, crushed her head with 20-pound rocks, and severed and buried both victims’ heads and hands.

Wesley Ira Purkey violently raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and then dismembered, burned and dumped the young girl’s body in a septic pond. He also was convicted in state court for using a claw hammer to bludgeon to death an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio and walked with a cane.

Alfred Bourgeois physically and emotionally tortured, sexually molested and then beat to death his 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

Dustin Lee Honken shot and killed five people — two men who planned to testify against him and a single, working mother and her 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters.

Read how presidential candidates responded.

Former Vice President Joe Biden tweeted: “Since 1973, over 160 individuals in this country have been sentenced to death and were later exonerated. Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty.” With this he reversed his long-standing support of capital punishment.

Nowhere does Attorney General Barr call for executing all those on death row, only the most heinous.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), a former California attorney general, said on Twitter: “Too many innocent people have been put to death. We need a national moratorium on the death penalty, not a resurrection.”

Maybe Senator Harris should be informed that we have had a federal moratorium for 16 years.

“Our criminal justice system has a long history of mistakes when it comes to capital punishment — especially when it comes to Black and Brown people,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a tweet.

She must have missed how most of these were neither black nor brown.

Some people have a long-standing opposition to the death penalty. It should not be the common solution to all murderers. However, juries that looked at all the evidence made the decision that the brutal murders committed by this group of murderers was evil and they should be sentenced to death.

Some of these have been locked away in prison for years. Why should it be an issue today? Senator Bernie Sanders, if elected, plans to give them the right to vote. It is entirely possible that should any of the Democrat field of candidates become president, they may well pardon any of these or other menaces of society. This would allow them to return to the communities that they came from and give them the opportunity to get revenge from witnesses.

Boycotting ceremonies is juvenile and silly, being hypocrites is shallow, siding with the most vile is sick. They say no, I say yes.

Frank Ruff Jr. serves as the 15th District senator in Virginia. He can be reached at Sen.Ruff@verizon.net, (434) 374-5129 or P.O. Box 332, Clarksville, VA 23927.