THE KIND OF INSIGHT YOU ONLY GET IN THE NEW MEDIA! Lest you think that they were nothing but a $7 million right-wing RSS feeder, the fine folks at Pajamas Media have published some Deep Thoughts from Rudy Giuliani about the kind of judges he'd appoint to the federal courts. Obviously, a site of this caliber wouldn't bother to publish something consisting merely of the most mind-numbing banalities. And fortunately, Rudy doesn't disappoint. First, you'll be surprised to know that he feels that the best judges are "interpreting the law instead of legislating from the bench," hence distinguishing him for all of the candidates from both parties, who are always talking about how judges should just ignore the law entirely and just make stuff up. But if that's not enough, he says that he will appoint "strict constructionist judges" and will oppose "frivolous lawsuits" (note: guarantee void in the case of Robert Bork). I think I'd have to consider the Republican race virtually over; nobody else has a chance against a candidate with such strikingly fresh ideas. The only good thing to come out of reading something with a higher density of cliches than the songbooks of Bryan Adams and Lenny Kravitz put together is that it gives me another pretext to remind us of William Rehnquist's gratifyingly candid definition of the otherwise virtually meaningless term "strict constructionism": "a strict constructionist judge is one who favors criminal prosecutors over criminal defendants, and civil rights defendants over civil rights plaintiffs." Indeed. So even if Giulani's thoughts were written by a computer programmed to randomly select sentences from a collection of "most over-used and vacuous Republican talking points about courts," at least he's telling the truth! --Scott Lemieux
