I don't want to freak anybody out here, but it has come to my attention that, from time to time, someone will say something silly on the internet. In light of this new development, I vow to expose each and every wacky utterance that I happen to come across in the course of my daily information superhighway internet web wide world perusal sessions.

Let's start with Dennis Prager, an unfortunately prominent radio commentator and columnist of a decidedly religious bent. Prager's most recent column deals with New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine's recently-stated opposition to the death penalty. Citing the governor's assertion that he knows "from my heart" that the execution of murderers is wrong, Prager takes the oppotunity to note, accurately enough, that he and the governor are two very different people.

What fellows is one of the most strawman-ridden, intellectually vacuous attacks on the anti-death penalty crowd that I've seen in sheer hours, and I say this as someone who isn't even fundamentally opposed to the death penalty, but who is quite fundamentally opposed to bad prose, which I believe to be an abomination against God, or, at the very least, the English language, which itself was invented by God, or perhaps by the English.

Prager engages in several unnatural, immoral acts over the course of his goofy column. In the interest of organization, I shall list them seperately:

1. In characterizing one grouping of anti-death penalty types, Prager writes that " [t]hese people say they have rationally thought the issue through and concluded, for example, that the state has no right to take the life of anyone not immediately threatening innocent life. But this is not rational thought; it is an emotional statement disguised as rational moral declaration." Prager does not explain why it is that this position does not qualify as a rational thought but simply as "an emotional statement," and he does not do this for the very good reason that he is incapable of doing this because he is wrong, unless the term "emotional statement" now applies to statements that are not at all dependent on emotion. The assertion that the state ought not to have a right to perform a certain action, for instance, is not dependent on any emotional basis whatsoever. For an example of an "emotional statement," though, one may turn to Prager himself, who writes elsewhere in his column that "when it comes to murder, my heart is entirely preoccupied with the terror and loss experienced by the murdered and the endless pain of those who loved them. I therefore find incomprehensible the compassion for murderers, as expressed, for example, by anti-death penalty activists, when they have candlelight vigils at prisons but not at the homes of the families of those murdered."

2. Nowhere in his discussion of those who oppose the death penalty does Prager mention the large contigent of people who have noticed that the sort of states where the death penalty is applied most have an unfortunate and demonstrable tendency to prosecute innocent citizens in a haphazard manner, such as Texas, which is proverbial for its terrible handling of serious criminal cases. By leaving this argument unmentioned, Prager is thus able to avoid having to deal with the reasonable assertion that the very real risk of executing innocent American citizens may be said to outweigh the state's alleged interest in performing revenge-oriented executions on American citizens who may or may not be guily of the crimes of which they've convicted, and who can obviously never hope to be released due to exonerating evidence after having been killed by the state. But neglecting this line of thought on the part of his opponents is a good strategy on Prager's part because Prager is a terrible writer who does not actually understand his own worldview.

3. Prager writes: "By every accepted understanding of the word 'justice,' it is unjust to be allowed to keep your life when you have deliberately deprived an innocent person of his life." This is just demonstrably untrue; even so, I am surprised that Prager wrote it.