Sandra Day O'Connor, who stepped down from the Supreme Court recently, gave a speech here in Washington last week in which she warned that political attacks on the judiciary could lead the country down the road to dictatorship. She alluded to but did not name attacks launched against judges by Tom DeLay, the former U.S. House majority leader, and Texas Senator John Cornyn.
"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship," she said, "but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.''
The speech has become a little bit famous for not having been covered. Few media outlets -- notably excepting National Public Radio -- covered the speech. Those that have drawn attention to it have mostly been blogs -- angry at the lack of mainstream media coverage -- or have written about it in the context of it not being written about. (See today's San Francisco Chronicle editorial, for example.)
