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Saturday, April 09, 2005

Humorless Yippies

The Moose observes that the today's right is performing a humorless imitation of the New Left.

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 an 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. For those of you under 50, those '60's radicals were a fearsome and rather humorless lot who brandished crew cuts and wailed on against the long hair hippie crowd while quoting Stalin and Mao.

It is only a matter of time when DeLay takes to the House floor paraphrasing Mao, "Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, Judge Roy Moore, Live Like Him!"
-- Posted at 11:19 AM | Link to this post | Email this post