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OPINION
THE MESA TRIBUNE | MAY 15, 2022
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Forget the killer; only victim deserves our sympathy BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ Tribune Columnist
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he man who raped and murdered Deana Bowdoin was put to death by the state of Arizona on May 11 at 10:30 a.m. This was 44 years, four months and four days after the homicide in question – or about 44 years too long by my reckoning. Even so, this column has little to do with Deana’s killer. This piece is about a 21-year-old girl subtracted from the world decades too soon, a young woman for whom there were no candlelight vigils this week, no protesters, no legal motions long enough to deforest the state. That’s the thing about the anti-deathpenalty conversation: All the focus is on the wrong loss of life, the wrong final heartbeat. The only death I mourn here is Deana’s, an Arizona State University co-ed mere hours from graduation whose life ended
on January 7, 1978, courtesy of three stab wounds and strangulation with a belt. “When you think about it, you think how could this possibly have happened to this cute, good little girl?” Deana’s mother, Bobbie, told the local ABC TV station back almost 15 years ago. “How could somebody treat her like that? And it hurts. It hurts a lot.” Bobbie died in 2009 after a fight with cancer. Deana’s father, Dean, lived nine more years before he passed at age 86. Justice for Deana took more time than they had. One wonders what Deana would have given this world had she lived deep into adulthood, say as long as the man who snuffed out her life. He was allowed to live until age 66 and still managed never to contribute a single thing to mankind. If only Deana had been given the time he was gifted with, the oxygen, the attention. She graduated with honors from Camelback High School. A debutante for the
Phoenix Honors Cotillion, she went on to ASU where she was about to graduate with a degree in marketing management. Perhaps Deana would have become an attorney or a diplomat – she’d already taken the law school admissions exam and the Foreign Service test – or maybe she’d have returned to Europe, where she had and lived with her family, to pursue a career in international marketing. That we will never know compounds the tragedy of her murder. We do know how Deana’s sister feels. Leslie Bowdoin James has been eloquent about the long wait her family endured before a lethal needle finally slipped past the killer’s flesh. As Leslie put it to reporters a few minutes after the execution: “Forty-three and 20: the number of hearings and the number of years I have attended since the indictment. Thirteen: The number of women that this inmate victimized. One and zero: The number of sisters I had up until,
and after, January 7, 1978.” Outside the state prison in Florence, those who oppose the death penalty bemoaned the unfairness of it all. They carried signs for the killer. Nowhere was the name Deana Bowdoin mentioned. We forget the dead all too soon, but let this 21-year-old girl be remembered far longer than the trash who ended her life. She had amber eyes and long dirty blonde hair, plank-straight and parted down the middle. A poet, some of her writing made the local newspaper after her death, 44 long years ago. “Parents and friends (with good intention)/Beg ‘slow down!’ But I just can’t mention/Why summer’s magic has its hold on me/I am too enveloped; can’t be set free/So while I am both young and innocently aware/I will exist in summer and be safe in its care.” Not safe enough, as it turns out. Deana Bowdoin was lost to a killer and to time, but never, ever forgotten ■.
Or Martha Stewart disclosing that she’s really a “hoarder” rather than the “doyenne of domesticity.” The difference, of course, is that the Secretary of Homeland Security remains adamant in ignoring the abundance of absurdity that accompanied his announcement. But the willful ignorance of Alejandro Mayorkas doesn’t dissuade wizened Washington observers from offering an accurate assessment of what’s really going on here. In a word, politics. How best to put tax dollars to work to discredit political opponents? Just claim that those opponents are disseminating disinformation…dangerous disinformation. And so, for the “public good,” not to mention its own political advantage, the left rises to say those on the right are wrong, and must face consequences – consequences far beyond losing elections.
Obviously, this isn’t politics as usual. It is a threat to our constitutional republic. Disagreement wasn’t always viewed as dangerous or deceitful. For most of our history, it was considered the principle that underpinned our political process. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the greatest fighting force ever assembled in defeating one of the most evil regimes the world has ever known, was eventually promoted by the American people from general of the army to commanderin-chief. Upon taking the oath of office as our 34th President in January 1953, the man who had just assumed the position widely regarded as the “most powerful on Earth” appealed to an even higher power. “May cooperation be permitted,” Ike prayed, “and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths.”
Sixty-nine years later, it can no longer be taken as an article of faith that the left still accepts the most basic of our constitutional concepts. Barack Obama, who vowed to “fundamentally change America” in his 2008 presidential campaign, continues on that mission as an ex-president. Appearing at an April symposium sponsored by his comrades at “The Atlantic” and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” Obama couldn’t resist indulging in some rhetorical misdirection of his own. Seeking to inoculate himself from what he was about to suggest, the former president asserted, “I am close to a First Amendment absolutist.” Then, the self-described “absolutist”
Disagreement now discredited as “disinformation” BY JD HAYWORTH Tribune Columnist
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hrough the mists of memory comes this observation from the nowretired Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson: “When one side deliberately distorts and misstates the arguments of the other, the intent is not to debate, but to destroy.” Samuelson’s mid-1990s assertion came to mind following the recent announcement that the Department of Homeland Security is establishing a “Disinformation Governing Board,” or DGB. Talk about a “pot-meet-kettle” moment! The imagination calls forth similar absurdities: picture Hugh Hefner in his heyday, taking vows of chastity. Or Bill Clinton announcing that he will forswear “senior statesman status” to devote the rest of his days to marriage counseling.
see HAYWORTH page 25
