60s Left: Smash the State! Today's Conservatives: Smash the Judiciary!

[wyldwolf]

For the past thirty years, conservatives have ranted and raved against against the antics of the sixties left. Perhaps because of their symbiotic relationship with the sixties left, the right is beginning to sound like them. Instead of proclaiming "Smash the State", the modern wing nuts led by the Tom Hayden of the right, Tom DeLay, are threatening to "Smash the Judiciary."

This trend began a few years ago when the First Things crowd kvetched about the legitimacy of the "American regime." As Dana Milbank ably reports in today's Washington Post, the right is now taking this a rhetorical step further. At a conference of conservative cave dwellers, this is what one speaker offered,

"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."

"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."

In contrast to the Yippies and the Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin types, the hard core conservative wing nuts are modeling themselves after the Stalinist Progressive Labor Party crowd.

More: http://www.bullmooseblog.com/

[HereSince1628]

1. But the anti-establishment left wasn't made up of politicians

Todays right wing nuts are INSIDE the government, working hard to establish a one party state.

[wyldwolf]

3. it's worse. They're on the inside and in the trenches

[teryang]

2. Destroying the power of traditional institutions is the means

...to total power. Undermining the Bill of Rights via the Patriot Act and creating Homeland security to totally revamp executive branch institutions were among the first measures.

The anthrax attacks on the congressional opposition and on the press were successful in rendering them virtually impotent, effectively converting the WTC attack into a Reichstag fire.

The traditional military has been disorganized with bogus light military concepts and disregard for operational law such as the Geneva Conventions by party hacks from outside the uniformed services.
Parasitic agencies were superimposed on the Pentagon by the neo-cons and used to subvert and supplant traditional intelligence agencies. The CIA has been effectively co-opted. (In a real military challenge Americans will realize effects of a security/defense establishment rotted to the core with political corruption and bogus ideological theories about world rule through the dispersion of forces throughout the world. The Air Force is the major service proponent of this notion, allying itself with the neo cons for structural reasons. They are dead wrong.)

Social security was another 911 victim, gutted by the desire to fund military expansion with taxpayer retirement funds. Further plans to disembowel Social Security are spreading fear and fear of political impotence currently through the country like nothing else.

The judiciary as the most stable state institution is the last bastion of believers in the old way, the "Constitution of the United States of America." They are the final target. Part of the neo-con assault is symbolically conducted against the judge in the Schiavo case to please the "volk" element but also with the "nuclear option" in Congress. In the courts, particularly the state courts, the judiciary and its components are being starved and legislatively attacked, in order to render rules of procedure and the Bill of Rights mere vestigal rights in the merely pro forma administrative bums' rush to injustice.

Many republican judges have no problem with this because they don't like hearings and trials. Like the judges and magistrates of Romanoff Russia, they prefer to hear nothing but guilty pleas. Anything else is treated as an alien aberration rather than an absolute right to jury trial. It may cut into their tee time, or delay their early departure to their weekend retreat.