WHEN LEGAL MINDS GO MAD

The New York Sun reports on a speech given yesterday by Second Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi:

WASHINGTON — A prominent federal judge has told a conference of liberal lawyers that President Bush’s rise to power was similar to the accession of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler.

“In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States…somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power.That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power,” said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan.

“The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy,” Judge Calabresi continued, as the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.

“The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual,” the judge said.

Incredible. The leftist mind apparently can warp any reality into support for its twisted politics, even (as in this case) producing the exact opposite of what actually happened in the external world. How Calabresi can turn the SCOFFLAw's attempted Mussolini-like installation of Albert Gore as our president, contrary to the results of the election, into a fictitious Mussolini-like installation of President Bush is a testament to the powers of the mind to disregard the actual world. Bear in mind that this man is making up constitutional law for us on a daily basis. If his mind can perform these feats of counterfactual "creativity" with the objective facts of history -- which can be documented and refuted by the ordinary methods of empirical investigation -- just imagine what he is capable of in creating, under the guise of "construing," abstract legal rules that require a modicum of intellectual honesty to apply faithfully.