Who Can Listen to Such Crap in Silence?

I can just imagine the scene: a dinner in Washington D.C. hosted by the Federalist Society, attended by prominent judges and lawyers, all notably conservative. Attorney General Michael Muaksey is speaking. For the national media, of course, the dramatic moment last Thursday night came when Mukasey began slurring his speech and then collapsed at the podium. Here in Seattle, though, the real drama of the evening occurred earlier in his speech, when a Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Richard Sanders, could no longer stomach listening in silence to Mukasey's defense of the Bush Administration's detainment practices at Guantanamo Bay and its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.

"Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, 'I've got to stand up and say something.' And I did," Sanders told The Seattle Times on Tuesday. "I stood up and said, 'Tyrant,' then I sat down again, then I left."

. . . .

Sanders said: "I think it was an impulse. ... At that particular time, I didn't have a chance to reflect on it. I didn't plan it out in advance. It just happened."

He left before Mukasey's speech was finished, Sanders said, because "I wasn't enjoying myself."

Sanders said he wouldn't call what he did heckling. Afterward, he said, he heard from a number of people — some supportive, others not. "Some people think it was the wrong thing to do," he said. "To other people, it was heroic."

Sanders said he now regrets what he did: "If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't."

Alternatively, he wishes he had said "Tyranny" instead of "Tyrant," "because in my mind, these policies can lead to tyranny."

Read the whole story by Ken Armstrong in the Seattle Times here.