Saturday, May 05, 2012

The Professor & TEA-SCOTUS

University of Kentucky history professor Ron Formisano writes regularly for the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky. He has the “compare-anything-I-don’t-like-to-Hitler-syndrome,” i.e., he compares his naysayers to something b-a-a-a-d in order to make his point. In his February column, he compared the Republican Party to “the posture of the slavery-dominated antebellum democracy.” Whew…that’s about as bad as it gets!

In his 02 May column, he informed the whole country and all the ships at sea that included in the Supreme Court is the “Tea Party Gang of Five.” To a liberal of Formisano’s profound persuasion, that’s also about as bad as it gets and indicates that justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy are lower than a democrat’s IQ (also as bad as it gets), some of them actually having (gasp) “engaged in breaches of ethics,” though he didn’t remark their perfidies.

Formisano didn’t condemn the “gang” for something it had done; rather, he castigated the “gang” for something he just knows it is about to do, namely, deep-six Obamacare, officially titled the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” though some evil people consider its acronym PPACA to mean the “Physical Proportioning of Affirmative Care Act.” Under this act, the appropriate czar decides who does and does not get a hip-replacement or (zounds!) who needs to check out.

Though it’s probably not noted on his resume, the professor deems himself to possess clairvoyance, defined as the “ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception.” To get an idea of Formisano’s sagacity, one notes this in his February column: “The conservatives among the nation's founders wanted a strong central government.” This is another way of saying these devilish conservatives wanted Washington to be the new king. They obviously had nothing to do with Article I, Section 8, and all of Article II of the U.S Constitution.

In his column, Formisano delivered an analysis of each member of the “gang.” He noted that Scalia, the court’s “intellectual giant,” was actually “calculating potential Republican Senate votes to overturn the law.” If that’s the case, Formisano destroyed the whole premise of his screed since Scalia would hardly be expected to overturn the law if he was lining up the senators to do it because he couldn’t.

Maybe there’s something in the water at the university faculty lounge. In a December column in the H-L, one of Formisano’s fellow professors, Robert Olson, remarked that four million people died during the Civil War to save the Union. That was 18% of the population in the North. The revision of history is a favorite liberal cause but one might expect a somewhat subtler approach than that.

Perhaps to guard against being labeled a racist, Formisano chose to excoriate Justice Thomas’s wife, who is white, expecting the reader to get the subtle connection…that old “judge a person by the crowd she hangs with” thing. Formisano called her a (drum roll, please) “Tea Party activist,” maybe as dangerous as Obama’s buddies/sponsors/supporters Bill Ayers and his wife, who went around blowing up buildings, shooting at people and robbing whatever wasn’t moving when they consorted with the Weather Underground.

Formisano called Justice Alito a “Tea Party hero” but didn’t say if that was better or worse than being a “Tea Party activist.” He said Alito disrespected the president during a State of the Union speech by shaking his head and conspicuously “mouthing, ‘Not true’.” Yes, Alito did just that when the prez orated a lie. Being attacked by a truth can be traumatic for liberals, ergo, forswear dealing with truth. Give the man credit, though, since mouth-reading is an art that few people have, though bad-mouthing is actually Formisano’s forte.

Formisano reserved the dreaded “What would Jesus do” condemnation for Justice Kennedy, citing the biblical “Good Samaritan” as the anti-Kennedy, even though the subject of his condemnation had to do with the blind man noted by Kennedy in the hearing, just as biblical and eminently more appropriate to the screed. Liberals have a tendency toward mixed metaphors when they attempt to use the Bible, assuming they know the difference between it and Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto.

Formisano administered the coup de grace to Chief Justice Roberts, however, for his unbelievably (reach for the smelling salts) misleading of…yep…the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Nothing could possibly be worse than accusing the nation’s top jurist of lying to the Senate, even though it also has its share of liars. Vice President Biden, the Senate’s most infamous plagiarist, was on that committee and voted against the Roberts nomination.

Formisano was fair enough not to mention the other justices (perhaps called the “Afternoon Tea Gang”)…didn’t even give them a political-party mention or aptly compare them to the Socialist Party. He was nice enough not to mention Justice Sotomayor, for instance, whose watershed ruling concerning discrimination (she favored it), was overturned by the Court while she was in the process of being confirmed.

The only thing better than revising history is revising the present. Ask Formisano. In the meantime, the “Tea Party Gang of Five” rides again!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

No comments: