Sonia Sotomayor and Louie-Louie and a truly weighty issue.
I recall that as little girls, my two sisters had a doll that, when the string exiting its back was pulled, would utter some incomprehensible, terse oratory.
So it has become the case from what is today’s Republican Party. Last week it was Cheney (pronounced “Chee’ knee,” according to family members) and torture. (Reminded me of Cookie Monster, “Torture, yum-yum, me like torture.”). This week it’s the Sotomayor-provoked rabid froth that’s dripping from their snarling jaws.
From her CNN-taped remark that the “appellate courts is where policy is made,” Limbaugh calls Sotomayor a “reverse racist.”
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200905260035
Ex-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that Sotomayor is from the “far left” and, if confirmed, would require the blindfolds be ripped from the eyes of Lady Justice.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/26/huckabee-maria-sotomayor_n_207620.html
Similarly weighing in against Obama’s first judicial nominee were all the usual suspects, the walking zombies from the Right; Coulter, Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, et al.
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What is truly tragic here is not that President Obama’s pick is in peril of not being confirmed. She will be, overwhelmingly, by Republicans and Democrats alike. (A prediction: Regardless of party, every senator facing reelection in 2010 will not dare cast a “no” vote against the Latina.) The tragedy to our republic is how terribly irrelevant the GOP has — to borrow from the late Chuck Heston — by its own cold-grey hands, become. Indeed it is a calamity swaddled in a catastrophe that is wholly wrapped in a tragedy. Recall the scene in Dr. Strangelove where the clutching hand of Peter Sellers, as the wheelchair bound Dr. Strangelove, uncontrollably stranglingly seizes at his own throat? That’s today’s GOP.
The calamity is the complete thought-free urn into which Republicans have headlong and head first dived. Nothing they say is worthy of debate, or even repetition. The party’s mantra is as unintelligible as the words to Louie Louie. (Turn your speakers WAY up. http://www.truveo.com/yank-barry-signing-louie-louie/id/301910433).
The catastrophe is the apparent enveloping nescience at the configuration of the Supreme Court and basic math. There are nine members of the Court; one chief justice and eight associate justices. The opinion of the chief justice has no more weight, in the final analysis, than any of the other eight. Decisions are made by a majority of the nine. Thus, it takes five members to compose a majority opinion and to render an enforceable judgment.
The tragedy is the absolute failure by the Right to comprehend the absolute truth of the parallax principle. Depending entirely on the perspective of the viewer, a tube can be a circle, an ellipse, or a rectangle. But they don’t get that. And voluntarily refuse to. It’s a Dark Ages, anti-scientific religious mentality that depends 100% on ignorance and fear of all possible alternate explanations for its survival. In 2000, the hard Right of the Court accepted a case, a political question, Bush v. Gore, something the Court through the entirety of all its prior years had never done. It was the definition of “activism,” and it was activism at its very worst. Nonetheless, with Scalia and Thomas and Alito and Roberts cemented on the most extreme right end of the dial, the prospect of a candidate who is not right from the Scalia and Thomas mold is considered by the GOP to be precisely what Mike — Henny Penny “the sky is falling” — Huckabee cried.
The party has fallen to naught but a theater of the macabre; Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, and Stanley “A Clockwork Orange” Kubric.
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However I also have an abiding anxiety concerning Sotomayor, it distills not from the judge’s judicial positions. As a candidate with more genuine judicial experience than any previous candidate through the past 100 years, she is responsible for issuing thousands of opinions. I’ve read none of them. My concern draws from the fact she is Roman Catholic, and would be the sixth Roman Catholic on that most august bench.
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