Wackos in Washington

In a previous post on the conference on Confronting the Judicial War on Faith, I mentioned Edwin Vieira. Here's a report on his comments from last week:

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony M.] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law." Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

Vieira has a habit of referring to figures from the Russian Revolution. Here's an excerpt from a speech he made in 1998, titled, "How to Restore Constitutional Money: The Challenge" in which he presents a rather esoteric theory of why our economic system is unconstitutional:

The Civil War was the beginning of the degeneration or the devolution to the American Constitutional monetary system. In 1862, the Congress submits the first legal tender paper currency, the greenbacks, and it maintained those as an irredeemable currency until the 1870s.
Of course, the Supreme Court was there to give all sorts of fallacious reasons as to why that was justifiable. Always be sure the Supreme Court will be there to give reasons when the cogs turn in one direction, but never to give reasons when the cogs turn in the other direction (and I have spent 25 years futzing around with the Supreme Court, so I speak from experience).

So we see one connection between the corruption of our judiciary and the monetary system. Continuing with his paranoid ramblings from 1998:

This brings you now in a sense to Lenin's question, or it brings me in a sense to Lenin's question, "What is to be done?".
Well, we first have to realize what we have. We have essentially a fascistic banking cartel running this country. This is really nothing different from what Mussolini would have set up, except maybe the uniforms are not as nice and the parades are not as big, because they want to keep the level of public understanding down. But fundamentally this is the fascist system, and I use that word in the technical economic sense, without any pejoratives at all.

Last week's conference was not just a gathering of obscure wackos. As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post:

This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

You will remember that last week President Bush cast aspersions on the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury, when he said that all there is backing up Social Security is meaningless paper:

There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand.

Powerful people in Washington pay attention to this lunacy, which means we have to pay attention as well.