California’s governor on Thursday rejected releasing Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan from prison more than a half-century after the 1968 slaying that the governor called one of America’s “most notorious crimes.”
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Aside from causing Kennedy’s then-pregnant wife and 10 children “immeasurable suffering,” Newsom said the slaying “also caused great harm to the American people.”
It “upended the 1968 presidential election, leaving millions in the United States and beyond mourning the promise of his candidacy,” Newsom wrote. “Mr. Sirhan killed Senator Kennedy during a dark season of political assassinations, just nine weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder and four and a half years after the murder of Senator Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy.”
But for the Supreme Court halting executions in 1972, that little fuck would have been duly stuffed into a gas chamber. Which would have been justice. That asswipe, by shooting RFK, nullified the votes of millions of people and denied the entire country the possibility of voting for Sen. Kennedy in 1968. Arguably, without Sirhan, there would have been no "war on drugs" declared in 1970 and we'd have a lot more of the Constitution intact.
He should have been executed about four million times. But dying in prison is a substitute.
To my recollection it was a cusp: the day before we had hope, enthusiasm; future so bright we had to wear shades.
ReplyDeleteI've written about how my generation dropped the ball. We had the chance to change the world and then, selfish assholes, we didn't. And here we are ...