I think I get depressed every January

I am often depressed in the new year. Probably not that uncommon. After all, we spend the second half of the year gearing up for Christmas and when it is gone, it leaves a hole. My family has had a rough year, and I am still tired from the last half of the year. My job isn't great. I am grateful to have one, but feel like I am treading water.

The news hasn't been good for people who think like me. I know that may be a small group, but it matters to me. Tsunamis, torture, etc. All depressing. I know I have written about this before, but I still struggle with the religious right and their abdication of moral responsibility. I can't answer why that bothers me so much. Why do I care what Jerry Falwell or the SBC church down the street thinks? I think I still see them with moral authority. You don't grow up in a SBC household without internalizing a lot of the religious thinking. For years, even as I disagreed with my friends and family who were in conservative churches, I conceded a sense of morality to them. I no longer do that.

When conservatives chided me about Clinton's sex life, I knew they had a point. I argued (and continue to argue) that Clinton's immoral act was personal. I don't condone it, but neither did I think it rose to the level of impeachment. I understood that this particular argument held very little credence to my conservative friends who saw in Clinton an embodiment of the moral decline of our country. That moral decline was intensely personal and my conservative friends wanted that to stop or change. I could respect that. I disagreed, but respected that.

That respect is gone now. The same people who chided me for Clinton have bent over backward to excuse Bush. As the bumper sticker goes: "When Clinton lied, no one died." That pretty much sums it up. Bush has dissembled with arrogance. He has ignored advice. He has contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. He has put America in a vulnerable place by invading a country disconnected to the war on terror. He has been less than honest about his motives, and the cost has been massive.

What does this have to do with my depression? I have written recently about Albert Gonzales and his support of torture, and the inconceivable notion of appointing him to AG and possibly the Supreme Court later. Here is yet another story about Gonzales. I wrote about this sometime ago, but Salon is rerunning the original story. When Gonzales was counsel to then Governor Bush, he edited or so poorly represented the death penalty clemency appeals, that Bush had no problem sending these people to their deaths.

Gonzales' memos, running anywhere from three to seven pages, are, in many cases, so slapdash, incomplete and inaccurate that no one relying on them could possibly make a fair, balanced and intelligent decision as to whether clemency should have been a consideration. Anyone relying solely on Gonzales' briefings would have probably done exactly what Bush did -- put a little black check next to the word "Deny" at the end of the summary and send the offender to his death. True, Gonzales and his staff of lawyers were handling an unprecedented number of executions. But Gonzales' omissions appear less the oversights of overworked attorneys than the deliberate design of a lawyer who knew what his client wanted -- an open-and-shut argument for execution -- and was all too happy to deliver.

How otherwise might one explain Gonzales' summary of the Terry Washington murder case? Washington was executed on May 6, 1997, for the murder of Beatrice Huling, a 29-year-old mother of two. Huling was stabbed 85 times and nearly eviscerated. For many people those facts alone would be sufficient to fry Washington. But Bush seemed to set forth a higher moral standard of review. In his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," he wrote that he wanted to be informed if "there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair."

Yet in Washington's case there was a sizable body of evidence the jury never heard, which should have made it glaringly obvious that Washington's trial met even the most conservative definition of unfairness. Jurors weren't told that Washington was mentally retarded and brain damaged, that as a child he and his 10 siblings were repeatedly whipped with water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers and automobile fan belts. Gonzales apparently concluded that this evidence was insignificant, because he didn't bother to mention it in the summary he prepared for Bush. Instead he wrongly suggested that there was "conflicting information" about Washington's mental state. Gonzales also didn't bother to mention Washington's forceful claim of ineffective counsel, arising from his attorney's failure first to present jurors with the mitigating evidence of Washington's childhood abuse and mental retardation and, second, to call a mental health expert to testify to these facts.

Back to my depression. The moral people I used to respect have bent over backward to excuse someone who supported torture--and someone who made it easier to consign to our dubious death penalty system. The Christians--who claim to believe in life and truth--have made excuses for someone who lies and kills. How does that happen? How do moral people look the other way while one of their political heroes acts with such callousness toward life?

It is hard for me to come to any other conclusion than these people don't care about life or truth as they say. I think this qualifies as evil. If you can callously look the other way when possibly innocent people are executed, that is evil. What does it make you if you promote someone who does that? And if you look the other way as an American, then........