Sandra Day O'Connor tells it like it is (too bad she's retired)

Yes, how nice to see retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor speak up against the anti-judicial politics of the Republicans and the danger to American democracy posed by anti-judicial Republicans like Tom DeLay (and otherwise blatantly irresponsible ones like John Cornyn).

From NPR's Nina Totenberg, The Raw Story has the story here. Key passage:

In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms... Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

I'm sure Republican apologists will write O'Connor off as a cranky old centrist, a moderate who was never a real Republican (did Reagan make a mistake?), but her dire warning that these demagogic Republicans have placed America on the slippery slope to dictatorship, the populist tyranny that worried Madison, ought to be heeded.

Here's yet another reason -- and a pretty good one -- why America needs desperately to be saved from the clutches of Republican rule.