THE BROWN SHIRTS ARE COMING FOR OUR JUDGES

My God, these people are beginning to sound like not only sympathizers, but domestic terrorists themselves. Do they really think they can get away with veiled threats of violence against Supreme Court justices and not suffer any adverse political consequences? If they're right, and they can, this nation has entered a very dark tunnel indeed.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer -- and perhaps a few more bodyguards.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
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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. [Emphasis mine]

Why should we presume any such thing? Taking Rep. DeLay's and Sen. Cornyn's prior comments into account, it is becoming increasingly clear that radical Republicanism is establishing a pattern of using rhetoric to intimidate and threaten our independent judiciary. If some wingnut DOES commit violence against judges, saying "well, we never said to harm anyone physically" won't be nearly good enough.

UPDATE: Ruth Marcus' WaPo op-ed reports DeLay delivered a videotaped keynote address to the conference, during which he said, "Our next step, whatever it is, must be more than rhetoric." PRESUMABLY Vieira heard The Hammer's remarks before he quoted Stalin. So was using the quote a rhetorical device, or not? We report, you decide.