Wednesday, April 27, 2005
More Proof That the Idiots are Still Running the Asylum...
The asylum being, of course, The Tennessean. This editorial is the proof.
One could spend all day hammering this editorial, but that would prove to be an exercise in futility as many have done such a thing before and it only seems to make the editors of Al Gore's paper lower their standards rather than raise them up. You have to wonder where some of this stuff is coming from, though. Judges do speak out - particularly the "Nine Horsemen of the apocalypse." Sure, they don't give press conferences on the Senate floor, but they do speak regularly on college campuses (see Justice Scalia's remarks at NYU two weeks ago and the resulting controversy) and at policy group roundtables (see Justice O'Connor's remarks on the judicial activism controversy and Justice Ginsburg's speech on the Court's use of International Law). (It should be noted that the above examples of judicial speech all are recent; it wasn't like I had to Google them in order to find obscure events to back my claims.) Also, what is the intended point of this paragraph:
"The current court-bashers should take a lesson from history. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt tried to stack the Supreme Court when he didn't like its New Deal decisions. President Thomas Jefferson got angry with Samuel Chase, a signer of the Declaration of Independence he wrote, and Congress tried to have him impeached. Both efforts failed."
I suppose that the esteemed editors of the "Great Deceiver" want to place emphasis on the last line - that both efforts failed. However, that was not how I took the passage the first time I read it. I saw efforts by two very different Presidents politically that were constitutional in nature but whose failure did not in any way diminish their actors' leadership or their place in American history. In such case, wouldn't Bush and Frist want to continue with their efforts, to become part of the tradition reaching back to such luminaries as Jefferson and FDR?
That's probably not the message that the editor was trying to get across, as it seems a bit too thought out for The Tennessean...
One could spend all day hammering this editorial, but that would prove to be an exercise in futility as many have done such a thing before and it only seems to make the editors of Al Gore's paper lower their standards rather than raise them up. You have to wonder where some of this stuff is coming from, though. Judges do speak out - particularly the "Nine Horsemen of the apocalypse." Sure, they don't give press conferences on the Senate floor, but they do speak regularly on college campuses (see Justice Scalia's remarks at NYU two weeks ago and the resulting controversy) and at policy group roundtables (see Justice O'Connor's remarks on the judicial activism controversy and Justice Ginsburg's speech on the Court's use of International Law). (It should be noted that the above examples of judicial speech all are recent; it wasn't like I had to Google them in order to find obscure events to back my claims.) Also, what is the intended point of this paragraph:
"The current court-bashers should take a lesson from history. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt tried to stack the Supreme Court when he didn't like its New Deal decisions. President Thomas Jefferson got angry with Samuel Chase, a signer of the Declaration of Independence he wrote, and Congress tried to have him impeached. Both efforts failed."
I suppose that the esteemed editors of the "Great Deceiver" want to place emphasis on the last line - that both efforts failed. However, that was not how I took the passage the first time I read it. I saw efforts by two very different Presidents politically that were constitutional in nature but whose failure did not in any way diminish their actors' leadership or their place in American history. In such case, wouldn't Bush and Frist want to continue with their efforts, to become part of the tradition reaching back to such luminaries as Jefferson and FDR?
That's probably not the message that the editor was trying to get across, as it seems a bit too thought out for The Tennessean...
Permalink posted by Rob Huddleston @ 8:54 AM 
