Judge Dread: Violence, Silence and the Threat to Democracy

To late to be whining now, you put the Goons into power, now you deal with the after effects of that power, like the people of America and the free world have to deal with it.

Thursday, 16 March 2006

It turns out that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presaged the recent comments by former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor about the growing threat of right-wing violence against the judiciary – and the concominant threat to American democracy. (What's left of it.) Both women emphasize the point that this "fringe" threat is being fed and exacerbated by the bellicose and undemocratic rhetoric of so-called mainstream Republicans, like felonious Tom DeLay, odious Bush bootlicker Tom Feeney of Florida, and Imamess Anne Coulter, with her fatwa calling for the death of Justice John Paul Stevens.

What is remarkable is seeing these bastions of the American Establishment echoing the insights of such "leftist" (to borrow the always ignorantly employed terminology of the Right and the media) commentators as Dave Neiwert, who for years has been tracking the deadly symbiosis between "mainstream" Republican rhetoric and the violently minded fringe. The two have entered into a sinister dynamic: as the former grows more virulent, the latter become more emboldened, stepping out of the shadows, ready to pursue what Bush once called – in his "National Security Strategy" enshrining aggressive war as a core principle of the United States – the "path of action." With this exaltation of violence being trumpeted from the highest reaches of American society, is it any wonder that the thugs are slithering out from the bottom?

There is of course another remarkable aspect to the story of the judges' outcry: the fact that it has meet with almost total silence in the mainstream press. What should be a major scandal – the nation's top judicial figures saying plainly that the lives of judges, and the life of our Republic, is under direct threat from violence openly abetted by the rhetoric of the nation's ruling party – is simply ignored, or treated as a minor brief to be buried in the back pages somewhere. But oh, the crocodile tears we will see pouring from the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, the earnest, furrowed-brow tut-tutting we will see from Tim Russert and Bob Schieffer, when at last the fringe succeeds in Coulter's dream of assassinating a Supreme Court judge. How, they will cry, did this happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Excerpt from Supreme Court Justice Reveals Death Threats (AP):

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