Weird Right Wing Ranting

One of the things I've noticed over the last couple years is that there is large collection of conservative webpages that tend to print columns by the same mostly unknown writers - Vincent Fiore, Robert Meyer, Jim Kouri, Joseph Grant Swank and many others. You can find them all over the web on pages that are essentially clones of each other, featuring amateur (and amateurish) pundit wannabes like these. But this column, by someone named Curtis Dahlgren, is one of the strangest and most incoherent screeds I've ever read. It has a title - "Justice" is blind-drunk with raw judicial power - that makes it appear it has a theme. But it appears to be just randomly disconnected gripes and complaints. Like this bizarre beginning:

It's not that the A-cademic elites think that they're so smart -- they just think we're vewwy, vewwy S-STUPID. Examples:

# The Ninth short-circuited Court of Appeals says parents of public school students have absolutely no rights regarding sex education.

# One of the 9-11 plotters was given leniency by a "jury of his peers."

# The Environmental Protection lobby won "protected status" for certain flies!

And he goes on to list a half a dozen more disconnected items, thing he apparently finds troubling - but none of which have anyhing at all to do with "academic elites". It's almost as if he's playing a game with refrigerator magnets with popular conservative catchphrases on it, putting them together randomly. He then goes on to make more bizarre statements that appear to have nothing at all to do with what came before or after them:

If Nathan Hale were working for the CIA now, we could quote him thusly: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country, and that the New York Times leaked my identity."

Except that the only CIA agent whose identity has been leaked was not by the New York Times, it was by the White House. It wasn't even reported by the New York Times, but by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Then there's this weird complaint:

It's not that there aren't enough legitimate "civil liberties" concerns to go around. The "sixties" radicals have a strangle-hold on the Universities. That's a "civil liberty" issue if one is a conservative candidate for a professorship.

This is beginning to sound like just some random rant by a cranky old man about them damn hippies, isn't it? And if one really believes that consrvative professors face legal discrimination, one has to explain who Robert Bork, Robert George, Michael McConnell and so many other prominent conservatives have managed to live long, productive lives in academia. And that brings us to perhaps the strangest claim in the column:

Speaking of trial-by-jury, there is almost no such thing as a trial by one's "peers" anymore. Not after the court gets through cherry-picking members of the jury. This is especially true if one is a conservative up on charges brought by some jump-started grand jury. [A little-known fact is that a defendent can request a "trial-by-judge" in lieu of a "trial-by-peers," but even if requested, it would probably be denied.]

First of all, courts do not pick the members of the jury. Both the prosecution and the defense interview prospective jurors and try to get a jury that will be most amenable to their case. They each have the right to challenge and dismiss jurors. But the court has very little to do with it. And the last claim is false. At the Federal level, one doesn't have an automatic right to waive a jury trial and have a bench trial instead; the prosecution has to agree to a bench trial as well. But most states have laws that make it solely up to the defendant whether they want a jury trial or a bench trial, and most cases are in state court, not Federal court.

All in all, it's just one of the weirdest, most incoherent and rambling posts I've ever read anywhere. He goes on to talk about the left being dominated by a "Dark Force" and claiming that fetus' must feel pain because they suck their thumbs. Whatever this guy is smoking, it's pretty strong stuff.