The article in the Boston Globe is headlined "Rift emerges in GOP after Schiavo case," but the truly terrifying part of the story is the intensity of the radical right’s demand to gut the independence of the judiciary:
And no, this isn’t just another case of Fundamentalist Christians run amok:
I’m putting this in the Pit rather than Great Debates because I can’t imagine any half-sane Doper who’d call this a good thing. Rather, this calls – or should call – for universal opprobrium and contempt.
The world would be a better place if a large and angry meteorite should choose to smite any future such gathering. Bonus points if it’s waving a banner saying “That is NOT My will you’re doing, fuckwads!”
Good idea. Anyone who gets zotted with a lightningbolt on the bench should be removed immediately. On the other hand, silence clearly implies divine consent.
It occurs to me that few people in government, conservative or liberal, actually understand who makes, interprets, or enforces the law anymore. It’s all part of the great dumming down.
Not, mind you, that I think all politician are quite that dumb. They’ve just learned that the rest of huddled masses are too intellectually lazy to know or care when they defecate on our checks and balances.
I’d fetch my sabre from the wall and lead the revolution, but who’d follow?
This is what happens when one side is in power for a while. The people on the fringes get irate that the radical changes they envisioned aren’t being enacted. Remember Pat Buchanan in '92? Then in 2000 the far left got mad and backed Nader. I wonder who’ll be biting at the Republicans in 2008.
Not that these loons don’t make me vomit in terror. Ten years ago I used to laugh at people who claimed that our constitutional democracy was in danger of being replaced by a theocratic dictatorship. I still think it’s a pretty unlikely prospect, but I aint laughin’ no more.
It’s just the same old same old from the ultra-conservatives. Pat Robertson a decades or two back was calling for putting God in charge of the police, so people could pray and have God tell them who needs to be arrested to prevent a crime they hadn’t committed yet, and his idiot viewers lapped it all up.
Of course, God won’t personally be sitting on the bench. As is always the case, it’ll be his self-appointed representatives who be speaking on God’s behalf.
Aren’t there more interpretations of God’s word in the US than interpretations of law?
There’s municipal (city/county/township), state and federal governments in this country. Three by my count.
And how many religions? Several dozen Christian variations alone!
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Oh yeah… let’s interpret God’s Law in the US instead of the Constitution.
Part of the rage boiling off these guys is that they know, on some level, that the current war will associate their indelibly associated their theocratic politics with Evil in exactly the same way that WWII indelibly associated the genteel anti-Semitism of the time with Evil.
On another I’m giggling like a little schoolgirl imagining the faces of the politicians who courted these people as they realize they’ve tied themselves to a movement of lunatics…
Tangentially related, the Globe and Mail published a feature-length article on the impact that religious conservatism is having on American science policy today.
To an outsider, it’s incomprehensible. We’ve grown used to considering that the United States is the naturally the vanguard of modernism, leading the rest of the world into a new Enlightenment. It’s mind-boggling that this anti-intellectual groundswell has appeared and seems to be successfully leading the U.S. back into the Dark Ages, with all this antipathy towards capital-R Reason being applied in the most crucial matters of public policy.
How the fuck did this happen?
Church and State-- Greed and Hate – Two Baboon-Persons in one Supreme Gorilla --Aldous Huxley
IT’s Nehemiah. (The original Nehemiah reinforced Jerusalem’s walls, insulated it against foreign influence, and instituted many moral and theological reforms, but by the end of his rule human nature led his people to relax their mores again. And the walls came tumbling down, eventually.)
I know the feeling exactly! Many politicians thought that they were manipulating the religious right for their own purposes, never dreaming that the religious right was doing some manipulating of their own. Frist and the Bush Brothers have been steam rolled on this one.
One of the sad things is that there will continue to be some in the RR who will want to push this all the way. They will not be content until they can force their sick and twisted distortion of “religious” thought onto our government and all who live here.
I’m still holding onto the hope that Nehemiah Scudder will continue to be fiction. Heinlein would have been the first to tell you that he was no psychic, and I don’t think the American people are stupid. Scared, yes, and willing to follow whoever can claim safety the loudest, but not stupid. Public reaction to the Congressional free-for-all over Terry Schiavo was encouraging.
I was coming in to post the same link posted by Dr. Love.
If Viera “had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence”, he shouldn’t have used that particular quote. Words spoken by politicians and pundits in prepared speeches are gone over in incredible detail before they’re actually used; you can’t tell me for a second that the comments by Delay and John Cornyn and this joker didn’t know their comments could be seen as excusing or even promoting violence against judges.
I expect that the nutjobs are going to play their hands as hard as possible in the next few weeks, until the GOP leadership finally wins back the moderates by throwing Tom Delay overboard.
