Miranda Rights or Wrongs?

This is one man who definitely has the right to remain silent.

Those all-too-rare few of you whose memories go back a little further than American Idol, Season Five may remember a disgraced Republican asshat by the name of Manuel Miranda. Miranda was the counsel for then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and he was hounded out of the Senate after illegally mining thousands of emails and memos written by staffers for Democrats.

Well, it seems Miranda's belched one back in return. Spearheading an effort to oppose Judge Sonia Sotomayor despite the GOP having neither the manpower nor the firepower, Miranda midwifed this letter that was signed by 145 conservatives including such worthies as Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer (no relation to Jack).

Among other things, the letter calls for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who for decades has been a human jersey barrier impeding any and every progressive agenda, to resign. Forget the fact that back in 1998 McConnell had opposed Sotomayor's nomination by President Clinton to serve on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and has maintained that his objections to Sotomayor of over a decade ago are still in full force despite her having never justified McConnell's "concerns" about judicial activism.

In fact, the letter called McConnell, quote, "limp-wristed," which is to say he's a homosexual for not wanting to bash in the judge's skull with a Lester Maddox axe handle then eat her brains with fava beans and a nice Chianti on general principle.

Because those are just about the only Republicans and conservatives who wouldn't be in bad odor with this Kabalistic Kavalcade of Konservatives. And make no mistake about it, people, this is a pogrom, plain and simple. It's a pogrom that's designed to filter out anyone who looks as if they've spent an hour in a tanning booth at Planet Fitness and especially those who choose to use their life experience and their ethnicity when making decisions that may require empathy.

And we all know how adept Republicans are at things such as empathy.

They're so adept, in fact, that they get dry heaves at the thought of standing in an auditorium full of black people when they sponsor a GOP presidential debate. So adept that people like Bill Frist tried to block a roll call vote in 2005 when Mary Landrieu tried to introduce a bill (in the dead of night) apologizing to surviving relatives of lynching. So adept that Republican Virginia legislators tried to block a bill that would have apologized for slavery. So adept that Jesse Helms vomited out the most despicable filibuster in the history of the Senate when Congress tried to make Dr. King's birthday a national holiday. So adept that Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign with a speech about "state's rights" in the same town in which three civil rights workers were murdered just 16 years earlier.

Empathy such as that.

It's an empathy that was heartwarmingly put on display when Alberto Gonzales was poised to become our nation's first Latino Attorney General and was not motivated at all by the simple fact that if Bush wanted him to head the DOJ despite his moral turpitude and lack of qualifications, then that's what Boss Man gets and to hell with nonpartisan law enforcement, the fourth amendment and due process.

So now we're hearing a litany of abuse and personal insults from the GOP that's akin to what President Obama had to suffer through except on a silly-speed pace. She's a judicial activist. She's a racist. She's a product of Affirmative Action. G. Gordon Liddy even recently thought that the 54 year-old, post-menopausal judge could still menstruate and that it could affect her impartiality.

Yes, Liddy actually said that. Oh, you think I'm making that up? This is what Liddy said on the air recently:

"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Newt Gingrich has circulated his own letter, trying to use Sotormayor and his knee-jerk reaction to her as an opportunity to raise campaign funds. Forget the fact that neither Judge Sotomayor nor her fully documented history of rulings has anything in the slightest to do with the suffrage movement, civil rights and the Civil War, an obsession with Gingrich's that's even stronger than his obsession with Oval Office blow jobs.

"Humor Me, I'm Bleeding to Death."

The Republican Party's implosion of late that's almost sure to be hastened by Judge Sotomayor's nomination, brings many movies to mind but I think the one that's most apt, if you'll indulge me in my Frank Rich-ian moment, is The Suicide Kings. Those of you know the basic premise of this 12 year-old classic: A bunch of yuppies kidnap a retired mob boss named Charlie Barrett and duct-tape him to a chair. To make matters worse, they cut off one one of his fingers.

It doesn't require much of a stretch to see the parallels between this darkly comic movie and how the latter-day GOP has essentially held the classical GOP hostage and is slowly bleeding the life out of it.

The difference is that in my analogy, the yuppies in the movie are actually apologetic to the retired mob boss they've kidnapped and mutilated. The GOP, according to RNC Chairman Michael "Beatbox" Steele, "is now officially over." Oh wait. He didn't exactly say that. He said that the GOP's era of apologizing was now officially over. Gee, time flies when you're having fun listening to war criminals and profiteers apologizing for their various crimes against humanity and racist smear campaigns against a judge who looks a little too swarthy and greasy for them.

Or perhaps it's because they've yet to apologize and that they're, instead, hoarsely denying that they along with Bush, Cheney, Gonzo and Rove made the sky fall down on Chicken Little even though the last of the chunks of plaster are still raining down on their pointy heads and they're still vertically holding the broomstick that doubles as a sexual aide/enhanced interrogation tool at Gitmo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.


And the more the GOP waves the flag, the more they wind up looking like the very same guys their forebears had sheltered, employed and even financed, the same guys who they like to use to smear anyone with whom they momentarily disagree.

You'd think the Democrats by now would've seized the gigantic cartoon hole thoughtfully painted on the side of the cliff wall by the GOP and driven a fleet of progressive omnibuses through it. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote, they just run smack dab into the wall.

Because the fact is, even with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a huge margin in the House, Democrats still can't get shit done. And this is after coming up against a party that's more and more resembling an old, blind epileptic junk yard dog that keeps biting its own hind leg thinking it's an intruder on what used to be its turf.

So here's an idea: Since Texas Governor Rick Perry had recently offered to graciously and considerately secede from the Union and since Republicans need safe haven where they can let down their hair and be themselves... You see where I'm going with this, right?



It would be like a Republican version of Jurassic Park only more dangerous and they could use this as their tattered banner. And Miranda could write their Constitution for them when he's not too busy stealing emails and memos.