The Taliban Within

The lunatics have escaped from the asylum and taken over the Republican Party. All doubt was erased yesterday when conservative met to discuss "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny". This bunch of mad theocrats is as crazy, scary and dangerous as the Taliban. The constitution is out and the Old testament is in. As Dana Milbank reports much of their wrath was directed at Reagan appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."

And there is more:

Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy "should be the poster boy for impeachment" for citing international norms in his opinions. "If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well."

But Edwin Vieira out did them all:

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.

This conference of course follows the recent pronouncements by Mullahs Tom DeLay and John Cornyn that judges should be punished for going against "God's Law".

There should be no doubt that the greatest threat to the United States is not external but internal. The American Taliban have escaped from the lunatic asylum and taken control of the Republican Party.