The bizarre deference we extend to judges

R.I.P. Terri Schiavo. Here's Ann Coulter on activist judges and the way we've been conditioned to believe that they are not part of the government:

Alexander Hamilton's famous last words in "The Federalist" described the judiciary as the "least dangerous branch," because it had neither force nor will. Now the judiciary is the most dangerous branch. It doesn't need force because it has smoke and mirrors and a lot of people defending the moronic scribblings of any judge as the perfect efflorescence of "the rule of law." This week, an indisputably innocent woman will be killed by the government for one reason: Judge Greer of Pinellas County, Fla., ordered it. Polls claim that a majority of Americans objected to action by the U.S. Congress in the Schiavo case as "government intrusion" into a "private family matter" — as if Judge Greer is not also the government. So twisted is our view of the judiciary that a judicial decree is treated like a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a rainbow or an act of God. Our infallible, divine ruler is a county judge in Florida named George Greer, who has more authority in America than the U.S. Congress, the president and the governor. No wonder the Southern Baptist Church threw Greer out: Only one god per church! It's a good system if you like monarchy and legally sanctioned murder. But spare me the paeans to "strict constructionism" and "limited government."

The last thing I want to say on this sad subject, with poor Terri murdered by the judicial branch of the government, is that I've had it with the consistency-mongers who claim that all conservatives are hypocrites because they sought to use one branch of government (the legislative one) to prevent another branch of the government (the judicial one) from overseeing the slow murder of an innocent woman:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson