Moral rights and wrongs

From a recent comments discussion about right-wingers trying to impeach any judge who doesn't see the world their wacky way....

But when the far left wants to impeach Bush for 'lying' or Rumsfeld for personally abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, you have no problem with that.
Jacob Blue | Email | Homepage | 06.03.04 - 11:37 am | #

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Jacob, what you, and a scary number of people on the right, fail to understand is the nuanced difference between the legitimacy of "a tactic" and "when to use that tactic." For example, you have a gun. You use that gun to shoot the guy trying to rape your wife. That's a good use of a gun. You use that gun to shoot a guy who disagrees with you about Bush's plan for tax cuts. That's a bad use of a gun.

Now to impeachment. You want to impeach a president who lies to the nation in order to get us into a war. That's a valid reason to impeach, whether you agree with the truth of the premise or not. Had a hypothetical president lied to the nation in order to get us into a war, that's fair game for impeachment. Now the second example - you want to impeach a judge simply because his opinion disagrees with yours on abortion, on the civil rights of gay men and lesbians, etc. That's a bad use of impeachment, to simply silence people with whom you disagree.

If there were some rogue judge out running rampant over the law and our constitution, then no one would oppose his impeachment. But the folks crying for the impeachment here are the same folks who want to impeach the Republican majority on the Mass. Supreme Court for being "activist liberals." They're the same people who hoped God would intervene and kill 3 US Supreme Court justices because they overturned state sodomy laws. They're the same folks who call Justice Kennedy a "liberal activist" - even though he's a conservative Reagan appointee - simply because he wrote an opinion saying gay people shouldn't be thrown in jail simply because of who they are.

Once you look at the bigger picture, it's clear where the "activist judge" crowd is coming from, and it sure as hell isn't some well-placed concern about a judge gone crazy. It's a political ploy to stifle any speech in this country (legislative, judicial or otherwise) that doesn't jive with their warped world view.

And that, my friend, is no justification for this use of the word impeachment.
John Aravosis | Email | Homepage | 06.03.04 - 12:14 pm | #

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PS It's no longer just the far left who wants to impeach the president. Some of us hawks, who used to work for Republican Senators, think he's gone too far as well.