Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failing health has spawned a weird cult-like phenomenon

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failing health has spawned a weird cult-like phenomenon
File; from an appearance in 2018.

As noted in this space last July, liberals have become so obsessed with prolonging the life of ailing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that some have expressed a willingness to donate their bodily organs should the need arise. The motivation behind these seeming acts of largesse is not so much a devotion to the 85-year-old Ginsburg or her far-left ideals is at is a desire to prevent the “evil” Donald Trump from nominating her replacement — a very real possibility unless he is impeached, which is highly unlikely.

Yesterday Ginsburg missed her first oral arguments ever since being appointed to the bench  — a necessity occasioned by a fall in November in which she fractured two ribs.

Questions about the octogenarian’s declining health have led some on the Left to grow impatient with her for not having had the foresight to retire when Barack Obama was still president and could have named her successor. In a rather cold-hearted piece in Mother Jones, reporter Stephanie Mencimer is brutally candid in her description of Ginsburg’s physical and mental condition:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

[H]er speech is increasingly difficult to understand. As has long been the case, people strained to listen when she asked a question.

When a Supreme Court session adjourns, the public isn’t allowed to depart until all the justices have left the bench. After the arbitration arguments were gaveled to a close, I got up to leave with the rest of the onlookers. But then everyone stopped. All of the justices had left except for Ginsburg, who was having trouble getting out of her chair. There was an embarrassed silence as members of the press, the bar, and the public tried not to gape as Ginsburg mustered the courage to descend a single step off the bench and finally disappeared behind the red curtain. The contrast between the real-world Ginsburg and the comic-book superheroine of social media was striking.

It is almost as though the Left is going through a variation of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of dying. The would-be organ donors are at the “bargaining” stage, while vultures like Mencimer are consumed by “anger.”

Although Kübler-Ross’s model doesn’t allow for a “fantasy” stage, for some liberals a bizarre cult seems to have arisen around the longevity of the high court’s oldest member that includes mind games like this one, proposed on Twitter by Politico columnist and author Roger Simon:

Simon’s “thought experiment” calls to mind the classical literary theme of selling one’s soul to the devil, though maybe that’s just guilt by association.

(h/t Jim Hanson)

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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