Dobson & Levin Fight the Klan
Josh Marshall helpfully pointed us all to a Focus on the Family radio interview of Mark Levin (author of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, the latest right-wing bestseller) by James Dobson. Talk about a fair and balanced discussion.... it's like listening to a couple of McCoys covering a Hatfield family reunion.
Josh went right to the money quote near the end of the broadcast, when Dobson quotes some nameless minister who compared the white-robed men of the Ku Klux Klan to the black-robed men of the federal bench.
And that's vintage Dobson, who loves phony analogies depicting himself and his fellow extremists as brave souls defending themselves and the human race against totalitarian tyranny. A few years back, in a bout of self-pity about being "persecuted" by gay rights activists, Dobson took to comparing himself to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other "Confessing Church" victims of Hitler. Now, apparently, he's a Freedom Rider risking violence from the Klan.
Any day now, I expect to see Dobson at some Save Tom DeLay rally leading a horde of lobbyists and cultural warriors, arms linked, in a heart-felt rendition of "We Shall Overcome."
The whole Dobson-Levin conversation is an eye-opener for those, like me, who haven't quite had the stomach to digest the Latter-Day Right's view of the U.S. Constitution. Levin is a real piece of work, and it is not good news that his bestselling book may provide hundreds of thousands of readers with their only exposure to constitutional law. Unless I am missing something, he seems to object not only to recent Supreme Court opinions, but to Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that established the right of judicial review 202 years ago.
Levin's mastered the trick of stringing together every generally acknowledged constitutional abomination since then--Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. The United States--and breezily identifying them with Roe v. Wade, which creates a nice litany of "black-robed masters" enabling "slavery, segregation, internment and abortion." His "solutions"--term limits for federal judges and a congressional veto of Supreme Court decisions--would, of course, require either constitutional amendments or armed revolution, but that doesn't trouble Levin. At one point, he says "we can't get our hands on the Supreme Court, but we can get our hands on elected officials." Nice turn of phrase for a legal beagle, eh? But then again, in addition to being a best-selling author, Levin's now a radio talk show host.
The other really striking thing about the Dobson-Levin "interview" is exactly how far the Souderization of Justice Anthony Kennedy has gone. God, they hate this appointee of Ronald Reagan so much more than the "liberals" on the Court. With his usual stance of posing as a victim of those he is attacking, Dobson says: "Anthony Kennedy scares me;" Levin seems to posit Kennedy as at the center of a "cabal of radical leftists" who are literally taking over the country at the behest of "moral relativists" and one-worlders.
This duo's reasoning is something to behold. Dobson slips effortlessly from yammering about "lifetime appointees to the Court" to blasting Florida Circuit Court Judge George Greer, the Devil Figure in the Right's view of the Schiavo case. I suspect Dobson knows Greer is an elected judge who won a new six-year term just last year, but hey, can't cut those judicial murderers any slack, can you?
After all, when you're fighting today's black-robed Klan, you have to fight fiery cross with fiery cross.
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