Concurrent Head Explosions

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What with end of the month deadlines and temple activities, I haven’t been able to spend as much time writing about this week’s events as I’d have liked. And by all accounts the President’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was amazing, and I haven’t had time to see it.

The reaction of the Right to the week’s events is predictably unhinged. However, it appears none were more unhinged than that of Don Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion. According to Josh Marshall,

For all the blaze of history and march of freedom this week, no doubt for me the highlight was Justice Scalia’s invoking John C. Calhoun’s “concurrent majority” theory on behalf of denying marriage equality to gay men and women.

I’ll have to read the opinion to see if this was implied or explicit. Right now it’s damn early in the morning for insightful analysis, but basically Calhoun’s “concurrent majority” was the theory that sanctified the Nullification Crisis back in Andrew Jackson’s administration. It’s basically a way for minorities to force their will on elected majorities.

Charles Pierce:

Today, in his dissent from the opinion establishing marriage equality across the land, Short Time really outdid himself.

Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count).

They’d have voted his way if he were Randolph Scott.

What else have you heard today?

Update: More hilarity.

At Politico, Fredrik DeBoer informs us that The Left is already planning its next move, which is to legitimize polygamy. ” …the marriage equality movement has been curiously hostile to polygamy, and for a particularly unsatisfying reason: short-term political need,” he writes. Yeah, that’s got to be the only reason The Left is curiously hostile to polygamy, because you know we gravitate to stuff like that like ants to a sandwich.

Bobby Jindal wants to get rid of the Supreme Court. He may have been joking; it’s hard to tell. Ted Cruz is not joking, however.

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary. A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system.

Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. It also restores respect for the rule of law to courts that have systematically imposed their personal moral values in the guise of constitutional rulings.

In other words, we’ll make sure we can keep ’em on a leash with a little political demagoguery.

Ron Dreher: This is a sign that democracy is dying.

Bill “Always Wrong” Kristol has picked up the “peak leftism” ball and is running with it.

It’s the summer of 2015, and the left is on the march. Or perhaps one should say—since the left presumably dislikes the militarist connotations of the term “march”—that the left is swarming. And in its mindless swarming and mob-like frenzy, nearly every hideous aspect of contemporary leftism is on display.

Oh, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Bill.

37 thoughts on “Concurrent Head Explosions”

  1. Why does Bill “Always Wrong” Kristol get a seat at any table?

    I mean, if he is hungry and needs a place to sleep, he is welcome at my home, just like any other hungry and homeless person, but, WTF? Does he have pictures of media moguls and goats?

  2. When you’re using Calhoun and nullification in your argument, then you’ve lost. Cruz is, of course, completely wrong. the problem in our system is not the courts but the completely disfunctional legislative branch that, thanks to rampant gerrymandering, doesn’t actually represent the people and makes most members reelection as guaranteed as a Scotus justice’s next term. If I remember correctly, the only pro-polygamy group were/are the Mormons. Pretty solid republican group there, I’d say.

  3. Bardi,
    It’s got to be more than just goats.

    My guess is that it’s a combo of pictures of media moguls having s*x with a wide variety of farm animals, corpses, and young children.

    Now I regret writing that, because I can’t get the pictures out of my head of Murdoch and Ailes, and…

    GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!
    HURL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Whew…
    Better.

  4. “lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself”

    That Ted he’s a real Lawman! I wonder does he actually have any presidential handlers? Maybe they might want to sit him down and have a talk. It really is amazing to watch the right freak out. I mean what really happened this week, the nation seems to be turning away from old tired divisive symbols of racism, the court upheld the notion that healthcare is a fundamental right and of course the court determined that all married couples should be treated equally under the law. Wow yes those are radical concepts? This was a bad week for the right but it was set up by the horrible massacre of those nine people last week. That racist event while not directly tied to the political right in this country exposed the GOP’s southern strategy for those who care to look.

  5. With my high blood-pressure, I can’t indulge too much in the bitter and salty tears of our Reich-Wingers.

    Ah, what the hell!!!

    Barkeep!
    Give me a quadruple shot of Shadenfreude, and a triple shot of STFU!!!!!

  6. I will have to read this in more detail later but right now I need to say you have to be really old to remember “Randolph Scott” if it’s the actor who did mostly westerns, I think. It was a long time ago. Not one of my favorites, but I liked him. Think I will watch Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger today. They’re my favorites.

  7. Grannyeagle,
    Since Randolph Scott was a “squish,” maybe check-out a real man, John Wayne in any of his movies, or Coop, in “High Noon!”

    Those guy’s schwantze’s didn’t do any dances when another man was nearby!!! *

    *All SNARK – lest anyone think otherwise!*

  9. To celebrate our SCOTUS’s decision about gay marriage, I wanted to share – yes, again! – the beautiful Country Music star Kacey Musgrave’s song, “Follow Your Arrow.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8xqyoZXCc

    When Nashville starts to get more liberal, you know maybe the whole country is about ready for, if not a sea-change, at least a lagoon/lake change!

  10. Gulag: I like John Wayne’s movies but I have heard he was very conservative in real life. “High Noon” is one of my favorite movies and Gary Cooper is cool. However, Roy Rogers has been my hero since I was about 6 YO and I am never giving him up. He can sing too. Of course, there’s the added attraction of Trigger and Bullet. Yeah, I’m still 6 YO in some ways.
    As far as Nashville being liberal, they don’t come any more liberal than Willie Nelson and he’a from Texas too. Go figure!!

  13. Dolorous: Thanx for that link. I never saw Blazing Saddles.
    Gulag: I think Obama is a good president but he does have his flaws as they all do. In my lifetime, I choose Kennedy. It broke my heart when he was assassinated. I was only 21 and he was the first president I voted for. He stood up against the Pentagon and those warmongers. I think that is why he was killed. Once, when asked about being a hero when he saved his men in the PT-boat incident, He said: “I didn’t have any choice, they sank my boat.
    I will check out those links but need to take a break. Doing too much reminiscing today.

  14. So, in 8 years when the Right digs up/clones/drafts an electable Presidential candidate, “Justice” Scalier– I mean Scalia– would nominate a hayseed Southern Baptist from Oklahoma who went to the “Big City” (“Lynchburg” (I kid you not) Virginia) to earn a “degree” from Liberty University. A good thing our Founding Fathers ( whom he claims to venerate) did not, for the most part, follow this line of reasoning.

  15. I can’t wait for the polygamy ban to be lifted. Then I can have several women tell me what to wear.I know they’d gang up on me and make me work endlessly while they’re on a shopping safari. I dearly love my wife, but 2 like her would put me in an early grave.

  16. As an American Indian, I hate all westerns; and, I do not like John Wayne at all. While Randolph Scott did westerns, he was also in quite a few romantic comedies, usually playing the other man. He was a very good actor. I cannot get over these RWNJ thinking the left will be responsible for polygamy. The left has the greatest number of women who fight to keep the government out of our anatomy. And, as someone mentioned above, the Mormons are the ones into polygamy and they are all Republicans and hate Obama. I know–my twin sister is a Mormon and she occasionally goes on about how horrible Obama is, at which time, I tell her to stfu. She is also quite a fan of John Wayne, too.

  17. The culture war is all but won. I’m ready to start winning some battles in the class war.

  21. On the subjects of polygamy and Hollywood, one of my favorites is ‘Paint Your Wagon’, a western (without Native Americans) a love story where the woman elected to have two husbands. (Jean Seberg,Clint Eastwood & Lee Marvin) In one of the best dialogues of all time, the two men are unable to come up with any reason why one woman can’t love two men. The concluding line to the scene, delivered by Lee Marvin, “We will be three for dinner.”

    On the subject of court activism, the losing side always screams that the court exceeded their limits. It ceases to have meaning after a while. The court should be above politics – two times now Roberts has handed down decisions based on the law even when the finding of law produces an outcome he dislikes. I’m not sure that Roberts is politically far from Scalia, but in terms of judicial integrity, Roberts knows his job. I haven’t seen this distinction in print very often, but it’s important.

    A jurist should consider the facts and the law and let reason determine the outcome. For Scalia, judicial reasoning consists of making a decision and looking for the judicial excuses to support it. It’s a grotesque parody of thinking and only the judicial appendage of Clarence Thomas who affirms Scalia in all things is more crude.

  24. This old dyke primarily remembers the old Westerns on account of Katy Jurado. My god, that woman was beautiful! The men all looked and acted alike.

  25. Judicial appendage! 🙂 You got that right, Doug. Sometimes I see Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy when I think about Scalia and Thomas’s working that relationship.You know the old expression..Scalia better not stop short…..

  28. Uncledad, That’s interesting. I guess we were habituated to the confederate battle flag, Tom Petty displayed it too, if I recall correctly. It really didn’t start to get on my nerves until we moved to Florida and I started high school. Racial tensions were pretty high and it became obvious even at my tender age that it was a nasty kind of shibboleth. It’s funny how you can get used to something like that and it just becomes wallpaper for a while.

    In the late seventies and eighties, it seemed like a lot of us hippies turned to country music, people like the “Hag” along with all the classics from Jimmy Rogers on up. It was like making peace and coming back home. Besides, for a lot of us rock music was awful until “New Wave” came along. A lot of us were listening to “serious music” instead.

    It’s funny to look at old Steve Earle stuff. They were obviously marketing him as some kind of hunky young guy. That was before he went to prison and the whole thing went south. I think his best stuff is around the era of “Jerusalem” which was called the most leftist album of the year, and it probably was.

    Here’s a bit of fun, a song about Condoleezza Rice written from an alternative perspective where she was actually a decent human being.

    https://youtu.be/6FYjHM22rbM

  29. Thanks, Uncledad, that was a great version of “Galway Girl,” although I always liked one with a tin whistle in the mix.

    Sometimes I think about getting into folksy stuff again, I was fooling around with clawhammer banjo for a while, fretless AND gut strings. But, chasing Django has got my ear bent around jazz chords, I don’t think I can go back. That doesn’t matter much since I was never much of a talent.

    My right wing friends are in a serious tizzy. I honestly wish them the best. Maybe they’ll calm down and start thinking it over. I felt the same way after Bush v. Gore and Citizens United. The only trouble is that when I thought it over, it was still a “revoltin’ development.”

    They are on the wrong side of history and few of them will ever cross over.

  30. How ironic for Bill (Did Not Serve) Kristol to bring up the notion of “militaristic connotations.”

  31. I have to agree California doesn’t count as western even though most of the westerns were filmed there. I lived there for 17 years and it is almost like a country to itself. Back in Lincoln’s time, everything west of Illinois was considered the west.

  32. Its telling the kind of media institution we currently have that someone as consistently wrong as Kristol is still sought out for his opinion. He even blows up the stopped clock theory. And not that he’s the only one; he’s got plenty of company among other “wrongnut” pundits on the right.

    Bottom line, liberals/progressives are never given credit for being right, while conservatives are never held accountable for being wrong. Hell of a system.

  33. csm,
    Fair warning:
    I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO stealing that “wrrongnut” term!!!

  34. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/huckabee-same-sex-marriage-opponents-go-the-path-of-mlk/
    I wonder how long it will be before we see the Huckster chaining himself to one of the columns of Supreme Court building? I won’t count on reading Letters from the Bubbaville jail any time soon.. Why get yourself arrested for your convictions when you can con the stooges to take the hit for you?
    What a scumbag Huckabee is! He doesn’t have the courage to stand for his own professed convictions. He’s a spineless mouth piece who is preying on the simple minded.
    Put your ass on the line Huckabee…not your lips..That’s the measure of a real man.

  35. “Its telling the kind of media institution we currently have that someone as consistently wrong as Kristol is still sought out for his opinion.” Worse than Sarah Palin. At least sh’s got legs.

    “Bottom line, liberals/progressives are never given credit for being right, while conservatives are never held accountable for being wrong.” It’s the same with CEO’s: save or ruin a company– makes NO difference to your future marketability. If anything, we are a “celebrity” culture (using the term loosely). If someone recognizes your name, you are marketable no matter how “ducked”-up your opinions are. And that almost makes some kind of sense, since movies (and iPhones) for Twittering are are most culturally significant exports.

  36. “http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/24/catholic-church-writes-to-companies-who-support-same-sex-marriage”

  37. Swami,
    Who do you think the Huckster is?
    Doug?
    He’s not a pimple on Doug’s butt!

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