Andrew Sullivan points out Steve Sailer’s column about how the liberals have suddenly embraced IQ as being meaningful, after denigrating it for years as a useless and racist social construct.

Why? Because now, thanks to the recent flawed Supreme Court decision, they can use it to get folks off death row.

But Andrew also uses the occasion to take a poke at Bill Clinton, which, for once, is not justified. Clinton, many may recall, took time off from campaigning in 1992 to make sure that he could preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas, no doubt to burnish his anti-crime credentials. Mr. Rector has been repeatedly characterized as “retarded,” and thus even many of his erstwhile supporters were upset at Clinton’s cynical use of this hapless creature for political gain.

But the reality is that he was not retarded. He was brain damaged, as a result of a self-administered lobotomy–he shot himself in the frontal lobe right after murdering his two victims.

To my mind, even if one believes that people of reduced intelligence shouldn’t be executed, that should only apply if the intelligence was low prior to their crime (thus offering some mitigating circumstances). I see no reason, however, to show mercy to someone who happened to reduce their intelligence after the crime was committed.