UPDATE
…a few moments before Attorney General Mukasey fainted at the podium during his speech last night, he had been attempting to give “a stinging rebuke to intellectuals and others who ‘have viciously criticized’ the Bush Admin” saying their arguments are completely untethered to Legal Reality.
When Mukasey said he had been criticized for his stances and for defending the Bush Administration, a man in the audience called out loudly for all to hear: “Tyrant! You were a tyrant!”
It turns out that the man yelling was a Washington State Supreme Court Judge named Richard Sanders, who on his website is characterized as ‘a maverick, activist, passionate,”…. but tonight on Fox News, those adjectives were cast in this light… A woman named Wendy Long from the Judicial Confirmation Network (and, gorgeously dressed in a passionate purple blouse) said those traits: maverick, activist, passionate…. are exactly the kinds of traits we don’t want in a judge.
It turns out that Judge Sanders has said he is a Libertarian. That would seem to explain it all, actually. I covered the Libertarian Convention for Election 08 for TMV, and I can’t imagine most any Libertarian not copping to those traits themselves. There are others, but amongst Libertarians, those traits for personal politics are the gold standard.
Meanwhile, back to our story. The judge apparently piped down, and Mr. Mukasey went on with his speech, but shortly after began struggling to say a phrase, repeating it, but garbling it til it was incomprehensible, and then began falling unconscious.
What interests me at this point, is another ‘fainting episode’ that became famous in psychoanalytic circles in the 20th century… when Jung and Freud were traveling together and Freud learning about Jung’s newest creative work, Freud kept fainting at odd moments during their journey.
The psychoanalytic speculation about that happenstance is that Freud was so severely threatened by Jung’s challenge to Freud’s authority… that he literally was sickened by being challenged… that Freud wanted to occupy the role of kindly and all-knowing pater familias, and Jung had wanted to be ‘chosen son…’ inheritor prince, et al, at least until one day…. when Jung separated from Freud philosophically and pointedly, by publishing work Freud didn’t approve of, and thus Jung went off to found his own school of psychoanalytic method.
Not saying it is so. Just that contrasting that long ago ‘authority figure dispute with the prodigal,’ with a seeming similar conflict between an Attorney General of the USA and a State Judge now… is interesting.
Especially since there is no appreciable medical reason given for why Mr. Mukasey fainted last night. The medical press release today is maddeningly vague about what the trouble actually was, and instead lays hard on stress test, CT scan, MRI showing nothing. It seems a clang to not see a diagnosis in the public report. At the very least that he was dehydrated and the kliegs were hot. But instead, there’s surely another lost story behind the lost story above.
Although many journos think and feel that the Bush Admin is the most opaque of any admin ever, we shall see. Eventually. No doubt.