Rev. Rick Scarborough's Crusade Against Judges Turns Rabid

The foaming at the mouth on the second and last day of Rev. Rick Scarborough's "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" in Washington threatened to fill the ballroom with tiny little toxic bubbles of right-wing spittal.

The main target: Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Phyllis Schlafly said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott, Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."

Then Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy "should be the poster boy for impeachment" for citing international norms in his opinions. "If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well."

But the most amazing rhetoric came from lawyer-author Edwin Vieira, who told the gathering that 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." Then Vieira approvingly quoted 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 WashPost's Dana Milbank recognized the quote and obligingly supplied the context: "The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is 'Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.' " Milbank says that Vieira quoted Stalin's formulation twice, so that no one could doubt the firmness of his conviction and the darkness of his implication.

As Maureen Dowd said earlier this week, "Before, Republicans just scared other people. Now, they're starting to scare themselves. When Dick Cheney tells you you've gone too far, you know you're way over the edge. Last week, the vice president told The New York Post's editorial board that Tom DeLay should not have jumped ugly on the judges who refused to order that Terri Schiavo's feeding tube be reinserted. He said he would 'have problems' with the DeLay plan to get revenge on the judges: 'I don't think that's appropriate.' "

Wonder when a reporter will ask Cheney -- not to mention El Presidente himself -- where they stand on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."