Checking back on the green guy's dogmatic sputterings, this one is quite ironic:
Forget whether he or she is qualified, Team Obama will need to find a gay - hispanic -partial birth abortion supporter to fill out the court, instead of locating the most qualified person in America.
Ironic in that Posner, Michael's chosen nominee vis. Message 25798103 apparently fails miserably in the right's #1 litmus test for SC nominees, a "correct" opinion on Roe v. Wade.
He has written several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision holding "partial-birth abortion" constitutionally protected in some circumstances. en.wikipedia.org .
Looking a little farther, we find this from the man himself:
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation. becker-posner-blog.com
And more explicitly, this (unclippable) one from google books books.google.com . As a purely theoretical exercise, it would have been amusing to observe the base reaction to a Posner nomination.
Oops, I got to edit in one more ironic element for the road, on the green guy's other dogmatic obsession:
It is apparent that global warming, abortion, and guns, in approximately that order, arouse particular emotions among many passionate self-described conservatives. About the first of these three issues, I wish to clarify my position briefly. I do not think there is much doubt that carbon emissions generated by human activities increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by doing so raise surface temperatures. How much they raise them and with what consequences remain uncertain. I merely think that the risk of catastrophic global warming is sufficiently great to warrant more vigorous remedial efforts than have been attempted thus far by the United States. . . .
Some commenters seem to believe that because I am critical of the current conservative movement, I must be a liberal--maybe even a left-wing Democrat. To those commenters, disbelief in global warming, in the regulation of gun ownership, and in the criminalization of early as well as late abortions is a litmus test of "true" conservatism.
becker-posner-blog.com
The second bit there would certainly seem to put greenspirit in the "true" conservative camp, from all indications. To perhaps an obsessive extent, even, judging from local postings only. |
