Compare and Contrast

The Hammer was responsible for the first nail:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," said Tom DeLay, the Republican leader who moved the (Terri Schiavo) Florida case to the federal arena.

Then came fellow Texan John Cornyn:

"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," (Senator John Cornyn, R-TX) said. Sometimes, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people...I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."

Not to be outdone was this "lawyer-author":

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that (Supreme Court Justice Anthony M.) Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

...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."

And, most recently, during the Justice Bloody Sunday television extravanganza, Tony Perkins gave us the sanitized-for-the-religious-flock version:

"We have had an amazing response because people of faith are realizing that actions in Washington have a direct impact on their lives in the heartland," said Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council Action.

Ah, but what was Tony really thinking? Could it have been something more along the lines of what this lovely American family might have watched on their TV set almost 40 years ago?



(Click to watch)

Editor's Note: I had prepared the majority of this post last night. At the time, I was merely observing the stunning (and frightening) similarity of the current wrapped-in-religion-rhetoric with that of four decades ago. And, then this morning as I was about to finish up the post, I came across this via AMERICAblog:

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

Any questions?