Salutary

Yet another CONTEST: Bush Admin intellectual giants Condi Rice and Stephen “Boo” Hadley are forming a “strategic advisory firm,” which they are calling the RiceHadley Group. Surely you, gentle readers, can come up with a better name (and/or motto) than that.

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Today Minus 100 Years, the good (but extremely bloodthirsty) people of Cairo, Ill. were still on a lynching spree, hunting for the alleged partner of Will “Froggy” James (the NYT called him The Frog yesterday -100, but at least they attempted to get his name, unlike the black men almost lynched in West Virginia a week and 100 years ago). However the mob was thwarted by a mixture of subterfuge and a show of force by hundreds of militiamen.

A few more details of the treatment of The Frogmeister (marvel at the attention to repulsive detail in the reporting) (that’s a warning to the squeamish to skip the rest of this paragraph): “Of James’s body nothing remained except the head and charred bones after it had been dragged to the alley. It was decapitated and the head was placed on a pole. The torso was cut open and the heart taken out and divided into small bits and passed among the crowd for souvenirs. The rope was soaked in the blood and was also divided among the lynchers. Then the body was burned.” The next day, with the head still on the pole, thousands “swarmed” the streets. “Youngsters too small to see easily were raised above the head of the crowd by their parents.” “It was supposed that the head was buried in the city dump heap.”

The mayor, who claimed to have personally slept through the entire thing, defended the lynchings, saying that “the majority of the citizens are pleased at the turn of affairs, and... they believe that the result will be salutary.” Just the word I was looking for. He blamed the lack of executions in recent year and the failure of juries in several homicides to convict.