Don't mourn, organize

 It was unrealistic to expect an 87-year-old woman to fend off the grip of cancer indefinitely just to save our stumbling republic.  It was equally unrealistic to expect its enemies to maintain a decent silence for even twenty-four hours.  I was too sad to write about Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday night and now, thanks to McConnell, Trump, Joni Ernst, the vaudeville team of Burkman and Wohl and numerous others, I'm almost too angry.

Dana Milbank's elegy in the Washington Post located Justice Ginsburg's life in Jewish tradition, noting that she died on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, when the Book of Life is opened.  By tradition she would already have been buried, but her place in American life called for public mourning and tribute.  Do I read this right:  no woman has ever lain in state at the Capitol before?  (Rosa Parks lay "in honor."  In repose, in state, what does it all mean?)  And the first Jew?  What a lot of progress we are making.  Well, some of us.

It took Moscow's Bitch less than ninety minutes to remind us of his "lame duck" rule which prohibits presidents from appointing justices in their last year.  I'm joking, of course -- why, only last week names of distinguished jurists like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz were being floated, almost as if there was a spy reporting from RBG's hospital room.  Lindsey Graham jumped down off Trump's lap to agree, and Joni Ernst (R-IA) had her fundraising email ready to go.  (She has since apologized for being a classless, predatory, spiteful hick, but she'd like your vote anyway.)  Then the MSM began cooing about how nice it was that RBG was so friendly with vicious reactionary Antonin Scalia and sighing that such civility has vanished.  (They were probably the only people in the building who liked opera.  You can't talk about the weather every time you have to be polite.)  

Without a singe crass email the Democrats raised $90 million on Friday night, and more people gathered spontaneously in front of the Supreme Court than attended the last inauguration.  Trump has hated Ginsburg since 2016 when she called him "a faker" and expressed incredulity that he was still concealing his tax returns, but somebody in the campaign had enough sense to talk him out of a twitter tirade/gloat.  (Probably wants to introduce his insulting nickname -- "I called her Rotten Ruthie" -- at the next coronavirus meet & greet.)  RBG told her granddaughter Clara Spera, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."  Now Trump has called Spera a liar:  "That came out of the wind.  It sounds so beautiful [sic!] but that sounds like a Schumer deal, or maybe a Pelosi or Shifty Schiff that came out of the wind.  Let's see, I mean, maybe she did, maybe she didn't."  Unfortunately Bob Woodward and his recording device were not present.  He then promised to appoint a woman, possibly Barbara Lagoa because she is Cuban-American and Florida is up for grabs.  

A handful of Republican senators (Collins, Murkowski and Romney) have made throat-clearing sounds of disappointment at the unseemly haste, but I wouldn't depend on one of them to call 911 for me if I were bleeding from the head.  If the worst happens, Joe Biden has talked about enlarging the Court to neutralize the fascism, but that didn't work when FDR tried it.  But first we have to overcome the pandemic, the trashed postal service, the red-state voter suppression machinery and the Russians and elect Biden and a Democratic Senate.  

Mourn.  Organize.  Stay angry.