Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Thoughts I wanted to post earlier but didn't have time or was too sleepy ... From yesterday evening, hearing bits and pieces of the evening news as I was trying to wake up to go to rehearsal: is "crackpot state's attornies" going to be the next Republican content-free political noisephrase to replace "activist judges" for distracting people from what's really going on? ("Activist judge" = any judge who, in the course of correctly doing his or her job, makes a ruling Republicans disagree with; "crackpot state's attorney" = any state's attorney who, when faced with evidence that a Republican currently in office has broken the law, has the gall to actually indict him.)

In addition to the "we don't have to be bothered by little things like laws" message that it's easy to read into current attempts to protect Tom DeLay, I've got a linguistic bone to pick with both phrases: they take meaningful phrases and remove the useful meaning from them. If "crackpot state's attorney" means what whoever I heard quoted on the news wants it to mean, then we have a boy-who-cried-wolf situation ifwhen we ever do get a real crackpot abusing such an office to do crazy stuff. Can't "crackpot" be reserved for folks who actually do act like they've got breaks in the brainpan? And "activist judge" did have a meaning until recently, though not one that came up very often in reality, but now that Chicken Little Republicans have declared that half of the attempts to interpret and apply the Constitution (or state constitutions) are "legistlating from the bench", the term is diluted so that when the next real activist judge comes along, we'll have to throw in parenthetical comments and footnotes to explain what the phrase used to mean.

(And it's an essentially random half of the judgements, at that, since (as a Washington Post editorial this week pointed out, nobody currently complaining about judges doing their jobs has a consistent test, a definition that can be used to determine which judges are "activist", beyond "they issued a ruling we disagreed with". How about we just call them "judges we disagree with" and their decisions "mistaken", both reasonable descriptions of opinion? Oh wait, that doesn't raise the spectre of a grave threat from a vague conspiratorial enemy that must be defeated with campaign contributions and support for really activist legislation. Gotta tell the constituents that the sky is falling instead. *grrrrr* You see, I do understand the propoganda rhetorical reasons politicians speak the way they do; I just don't like it.)

And I just realized that the other thing I wanted to write about probably wants to be its own entry, so I'll put that off for a little while...