It Takes a Weirdo
I don't know if this is for real (I'm thinking not), but I can report that in the not quite four years I've known my wife, I've never seen her this excited about anything. Iowa, here we come!

Meanwhile, in the realm of "this should be a bad joke, but is all too sadly real," the theocrats convened again in Tennessee yesterday. Ed Kilgore at New Donkey drops the hammer (no pun intended) on this foul bunch of hypocrites and seekers after power, who show their true "moral values" by celebrating Tom DeLay, and are as unprincipled as the basest Tammany ward heeler:

[A]side from all the paranoiac (and very un-Christ-like) whining, the big underlying message from Nashville was that reshaping the Supreme Court is necessary to stop the alleged baby-killing, sodomizing, and paganizing that characterizes contemporary America. And there is zero, zero doubt that each and every one of the speakers at Justice Sunday II would completely reverse themselves on every issue related to the Constitution, activist judges, and all the other stuff they blathered about, if the shoe was on the other foot and the judiciary was promoting their own ideology.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that a future Supreme Court embraced the implicit interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause embedded in the Human Life Amendment (still supported in the last Republican platform): that unborn children are endowed with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Was there a single speaker in Nashville who would not hail such a decision as vindication of a Higher Law that binds all people and all times? I think not.

In all their talk about legislative and democratic prereogatives, and the horrific arrogance of unelected judges, the Justice Sunday crowd is painfully reminiscent of the southern segregations who relied for many decades on Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson (the infamous "separate but equal" validation of Jim Crow), and then suddenly re-discovered a populist hostility to the federal judiciary the moment the constitutional winds started blowing in a different direction.
...
I don't accuse today's Cultural Right of a unique political heresy, but I do accuse them of a great and notable streak of dishonesty. They don't give a damn about any of the constitutional and procedural issues they talked about in Nashville; they care about a particular policy outcome. They want to criminalize abortion, criminalize homosexual behavior, and sanction public displays of particular religious traditions. They will pursue those policies through any means available, and they ought to be pushed to the wall to admit it.