The right wing nut jobs have gone over the deep end when it comes to their hatred for judges. Read this article in today's Washington Post. Then, read it again. You know the situation is scary when the article, written by Dana Milbank, starts:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer -- and perhaps a few more bodyguards.The charge against Kennedy is being led by one of the long-time nutballs, Phyllis Schlafly because of his recent decision that juveniles shouldn't be executed. Okay, not to delve in to too much hypocrisy, but this whole "culture of life" crowd wants Kennedy impeached because he won't send kids to the chair. Huh?
Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
But it gets better...or actually worse:
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."Quoting Stalin as a solution to a political problem??? What the fuck??? And this Vieira guy is serious about Stalin-type solutions:
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.
Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. (I added the bold for my own emphasis) "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."These are the people setting the agenda in the GOP around judges. That judge-bashing debate is tied right in to the battle over nominations.
Every single Democrat in Congress has to denounce these threatening attacks. And these attacks are coming from -- and have to be directly linked to -- Tom DeLay and John Cornyn. The nuts are just echoing this violence rhetoric that comes right from DeLay and Cornyn.
Stalinist solutions??? This is out of fucking control.... and it has to be stopped. Every debate in the Senate about judges has to be about how America's judiciary is being threatened with violence.
