Some thoughts:
1- President George W. Bush is going to be regarded in the same breath as Lincoln and Washington. Their mantle rests on his shoulders. I trust him. My only criticism of President Bush is that he has not put the country on war footing, as during WWII.
2- There is no requirement that a Supreme Court nominee or justice be an attorney or a judge or in any way connected with the legal system. Being a Constitutional Law scholar now a days can be as much a disqualifier for Supreme Court service as being a history of religion scholar is a disqualifier for being regarded as an expert on spirituality. I hear the attorneys’ guild protecting its turf and I find that deplorable.
At local and state courts and lower federal courts, yes, be an attorney. But the Supreme Court is another class of thing altogether.
When the life of the Republic as embodied in the Constitution is at stake, far more than law is at stake, just as when the salvation of man is at stake, far more than religion is at stake. Reducing the Supreme Court to law is comparable to reducing salvation to religion. It is demonic, as the performance of recent Supreme Court Justices and just about all the representatives of religion have demonstrated of late.
On the Supreme Court should be Sages, not jurists. Jurists if they are Sages, but otherwise, Sages. The difference is about life itself, as intended through the Constitution, and especially the expansion rather than the dissolution of life. Mere law cannot facilitate life any more than mere jurists can establish justice and mere scholars can promote salvation.
The law is an ass, a tool, a means to an end. The law, including the Constitution, shows what should be. It cannot accomplish what should be. We have forgotten St. Paul on this simple point, as Jews deliberate do?
Law has no inherent power and contains nothing intrinsically compelling one way or another. Certainly trial and corporate lawyers both demonstrate that fact compellingly. From the top of the legal system, the view must be that the law, including the Constitution, is a tool, a monitory advisory embodying the distilled wisdom of the race and the particular society.
The law is not anything near, like or akin to something intrinsically important. Law is not a matter of ultimate concern. Religion also is an ass, of no ultimate concern, a tool. Law and religion can harm or help. This demonstrates that they should be guided by Sages, not by scholars, by See-ers, not by mere thinkers.
Scholars cannot help taking the object of their study for an ultimate concern — especially if they study it for years. They idolize their object, and idolatry is demonic. This is why, as best I recall, it has always been said that Supreme Court Justices need not be jurists by profession.
The Church, also, always has maintained that Bishops need not be clergy — a little known but important fact. One of the Four Great Doctors of the Western Church, Ambrose, was not a clergyman until he was consecrated bishop. The other three are Jerome, Augustine and Pope Gregory the Great.
At the top of the structure, directing it, wisdom says, have refined, intelligent, widely lettered, socially at ease, humble people. Their sagacity, not their technical knowledge of some field, including law, in the case of the Supreme Court, and religion, in the case of the Church, ensure the structure serves its purpose — justice in the case of the Court and salvation in the case of the Church — or victory in the case of the military.
There is a corollary of this point in the military in the fact that the top officers are called General Officers, meaning, they are not branch-specific. The top of the structure is expected to govern with general awareness, not merely specialized skill.
The argument that a Supreme Court Justice must be a jurist is comparable to saying a General Officer must be an infantryman or a Bishop a priest. It is nonsense! Furthermore, it is against the wisdom developed through experience. It is ignorant nonsense!
3- On another item: The give-away of the affections of former-CPT James Yee was his treating the fellows at Gitmo as Muslims. They are enemy combatants, from a military point of view, and they are heretics from a religious point of view. Were he a genuine Muslim, he would have been trying to bring them to back to Islam, not taking them for representing it. That he took them for representing Islam shows that he was himself seditious, one of them, a fellow traveler. He was schooled in Syria at a Wahhabi Madrassas.
Using the term evil bastards in the symbolic sense for the adjective, evil, and both the symbolic and the literal sense for the noun:
Evil = a claim of ultimacy for a non-ultimate. This is also the description of the demonic. Evil is a dependent power — depends on the structure of being, which is beyond freedom and destiny, which has aseity — not an independent power. Evil contradicts and attacks the structure of reason, which is also the structure of being. It seeks to defeat the power of being, which is independent. Evil champions a forlorn hope.
Bastard = an individual whose father did not claim them as his own at their birth or subsequently. In contrast, an outcast (one “born out of wedlock”) is an individual whose father did not claim responsibility for the individual’s mother, at the individual’s birth or subsequently. The father’s claim of siring establishes a child’s legitimacy. His claim of responsibility for the child’s mother establishes her and the child’s prestige in the community. Legitimacy and born in or out of wedlock refer to distinguishable and equally important public pronouncements by a father regarding a child he sired. Absent these pronouncements, an individual is a bastard, an outcast or both.
From a military point of view, the evil bastards are enemy combatants, not Soldiers.
From a theological point of view, the evil bastards are heretics, not Muslims.
They attack the structure of reason.
Furthermore, enemy combatants and heretics are the same anywhere. Those are their only classifications. There is no separate classification of enemy combatants by national origin because no nation claims them as elements of their Armed Forces. In the same way, there is no separate classification of heretics by religion of origin because no religion supports evil behavior.
Enemy combatants are extra-national (out of communion with the structures of history) and they are extra-religious (out of communion with the functions of spirit).
Our civilian and military leaders have half of this truth in view (the recognition of enemy combatants). The half they do not have in view (the recognition of heretics) is the half that will either defeat their efforts or so confuse them as to leave disorder rather than order as their legacy.
James Yee subverted his country and his religion by insisting that enemy combatants are Soldiers and, more destructively, that heretics are Muslims. In this way, he disgraced the office of spiritual leadership. His friends’ website honors him with the title “Captain,” which he does not hold because he separated from the Army without retiring.
As Yee illustrates, it is ultra-moronic, with consequences predictable, to exclude theological analysis from the tools of cognition brought to solve problems, especially problems of national security and cultural welfare.
And by theological analysis I do not mean biblical literalism, an enterprise of no less moronry than its counterpart of koranic literalism, which, as long as its proponents can exclude or expunge Western commercial structures from their traditional and intended real estate, has more potency in the current context than biblical literalism. I mean phenomenological, including ontological, analysis.
Fortunately, being itself and the power and structures of being, as actualized by personal and historical creativity, are paradoxical, self-manifesting unexpectedly. They do not accept and do always overwhelm evil and bastards … including both koranic and biblical literalists!
I think that the times this President has been surprising folks of late illustrate some of that paradoxical self-manifestation. The dyspepsia of Krauthammer especially in re Meirs is a good sign, I believe, showing the President is on the right track with her. I am an admirer of Krauthammer.
People think this President is a biblical literalist. He has sucked at that bitter tit. But he, like his family, are Episcopalians.
He and his father tried oil in TX but were not good at it. The family is too long in public service to have a background any more for business. Originally they are a New England shipping, fishing and banking/investing family, now very large and very long in public service.
Neither Souter nor Meirs are outside their graze. GHWB knew Souter and what he would do. Meirs is not another Souter, but she is a much-needed experience broadener for the Court, and that is why GWB picked her.
Skull and Bones guys take female empowerment very seriously. Their mothers never knew anything else and they expect their sons and daughters to influence accordingly. This will offend any crypto-misogynists, such as many conservatives.
AMDG
