With the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court today, Bush’s conservative and anti-abortion fundie supporters are now claiming victory as they hail their president as a strong leader once again.
What they fail to see is how the religious right, acting like a 2 year old having a tantrum and holding its collective breath until its face turned blue so daddy would give in, has once again hijacked the White House agenda. George obviously did not take his parenting lessons from his old buddy James Dobson or he simply would have spanked the kid and told him to obey his father or else.
What Bush chose to do instead, despite the fact that he is at the weakest point in his presidency and is currently embroiled in the culture of corruption scandals from hell, was to grab the kid’s hand and buy them the really big, expensive red firetruck they were whining about just to shut them up. And we all know what happens to a dad’s power when he does that: he becomes weakened.
He’s now called for a huge public brawl over this nomination which will further damage his credibility among mainstream Americans. He’s always said he doesn’t govern according to the polls but when the Miers reaction tanked his numbers, we all know he was damn sure paying attention. If he had the fortitude required to believe in and back up his decisions, he would not have accepted Miers’ resignation and would have pushed ahead. He’s worried and it shows.
Watching Bushistas like Bay Buchanan on Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room practically have an on screen orgasm because she was so happy with Bush’s pick today proves that this nominee must be fought at all costs. Listening to conservative mouthpieces asking Democrats to be “fair” and to look at Alito’s judicial record before they judge him makes one wonder if their memories were all wiped clean by some strange virus this morning.
They seem to have conveniently forgotten that it was their side that pushed so hard against Harriet Miers that she wasn’t even allowed to make it to the confirmation hearings. When you point a finger at someone, you have three pointing right back at you, as they say.
You would have thought that Bush and the Republicans had learned a lesson about pandering to their extreme supporters after the Terry Schiavo fiasco in which an emergency session of congress was called for to deal with the poor woman’s plight – totally embarassing the congress and the administration.
Obviously not.
If I was a garden-variety Republican, I’d certainly be concerned again that Bush has fallen off the rails by throwing out red meat to his fundie vultures. This will only strengthen their power. Ordinary Republicans need to step back and absorb this manipulation before they too join Bay Buchanan in public displays of quasi-masturbatory pleasure.
Update [2005-10-31 21:43:53 by catnip]: Crooks and Liars has the video. Thanks, John!.
Catnip, if I were you, I would simply submit this to the op ed’s of the NYT’s and the WOPO and others you desire. This is excellent and very well written. Thank you for all that you do here and your enduring this world of which you write. HUGS
Bay Buchanan would probably sue me. π
Best. Court TV case. Ever.
lol!
Let’s see if I can convince Patrick Fitzgerald to work for the defense this time. π
Frankly, I could care less about Bay and her rathers..:o) she is just a hack! Really you did a very good job on this, like you always do.
Catnip, you should e-mail her and tell her to get a room. That way Bay can moan (or whatever other expression of sexual pleasure she utilizes) to her heart’s content and out of view of the viewers.
Agreed. I was talking about the nomination on Friday and was pondering how nice it would be if Bush would actually show some leadership and nominate someone who could actually be good for the country.
Of course, Bush wouldn’t know leadership if he stepped in it…. so he once again runs from the chance to break the back of the crazy right — a minority whose grip on this country must be broken. They’re dangerous and crazy, and the last thing anyone should do is to do anything to make them feel stronger.
The Republican mind melt must have occurred at 7:00 AM, before the announcment.
My stupid schmuck Senator, George Allen, had the gall to use the “up or down vote” crap on the local news tonight. I was screaming in the kitchen that his fundie leaders didn’t allow an up or down vote on Miers. Fucking hypocrites.
MLK, we have it rough here in Virginia don’t we? He considers himself some kind of presidential prospect too. Someone with a memory of about three days. He’s probably not being hypocritical because he doesn’t even remember the Miers nomination. I have the sneaking suspicion he’s about as stupid as bush. He’s definitely the spoiled rich kid.
How about Kaine! Up 3 in the polls! We have a chance to have 4 more years of fiscal responsibility. Kilgore’s hate filled attack ads are, well, hate filled attack ads. Even some of the wingers are feeling uncomfortable I think.
Salunga,
I’m trying not to get my hopes up about Kaine. It’s all about turnout and who gets their partisans to the polls. We all know Kilgore is an ass, but that doesn’t mean he won’t get more of his sheeple out to vote. I don’t want to feel the disappointment of Nov. 2004 again.
But I’ll be dancing in the streets if Kaine wins! π
MLK I’m with you. Its hard to get your hopes up. I’m cautiously optimistic.
Is that craven of me? I see her picture on the cover of the NY Times last Friday, the perky smile, the rumpled unfashionable suit, the goofy hair-do and I think: Oh Harriet, we hardly knew ye. Maybe she was a rational human being, maybe she had a spark of human kindness within her. Now she is sent scuttling back into the shadows, to tend to her male masters. And now we have this bogeyman, this male conservative, that will be on the court the rest of my life at least. I know she was a wacky choice, but still . . .
I feel the same…she might have been truly awful (and those Hallmark cards – eek!), but I think she might have had the capacity to evolve and grow and, you know, judge things fairly. Which of course is what freaked out the wing-nuts…
Her only real crime was mediocrity. She seemed to me to be the kind of person I worked for in the depths (and I mean really deep depths) of the Washington bureaucracy at the end of the 1950s. Honest, severe, limited, and tending to wild fantasy outside the realm of her specific duties. Her fantasy was that George Bush Jr. was some real person of preternatural ability.
So she was mediocre. A copy of her exemplar.
The new nominee is not mediocre. He has good degrees, he is probably ‘smart’ in the disgusting way we now judge people in intellectual business. But he’s a kook. What else to say. The guy is an off the wall kook.
He won’t get confirmed. Either he denies his decisions on the bench, which confirms him as a liar, or he affirms, them, which confirms him as a kook.
All I can say is that I hope noone is surprised by this nomination.
There’s never been a scintilla of evidence to support the notion that this Bush regime ever made decisions based on principle over ideology and special interest pressure. Many may see the doomed nomination of Miers as an attempt by the regime to avoid a fight and somehow minimize the aqnimosity between the partisan extremes, but I don’t believe that for a minute. The Miers nomination was the result of the hapless imbecile Bush’s own emotional dysfunctionality and self-centered pathology. Neither Bush nor any other significant player in his regime have any respect for anyone who doesn’t agree with them and they haven’t once relinquished their aggresive posture on anything in the name of fostering unity or promoting mutual respect and cooperation in government.
I have so little regard for the Supreme Court now, especially after their disgraceful performance in 2000, that I look forward to a day when the mechanism by which we interpret the Constitution is changed in a way that renders the very idea of 9 lifetime appointed autocrats charged with that primary interpretative duty obsolete.
We need to declare and then permanently enshrine the core threshold issues upon which we wish to base our society and government and to do so in a way that allows us to move forward as a society rather than constantlyrehashing the same ground over and over again based on who appoints which judges with which particular ideological propensities.
We should agree as asupposedly advanced society that the right to individual privacy, whether implicit or explicit in the constitution, isan essential component to any enlightened society, and that the right of women to retain the decisionmaking authority over their own bodies is an indisputable example of that privacy right.
We should agree that protecting the common man, and child, from the excesses and depradations of the powewrful, is a primary principle in any civilized society, and that all people should have access to redress and remedy when wronged.
These are not complicated principles, yet we’ve been battling over them repeatedly for 60 years. It’s time to stop this cycle of idiocy and redeclare what’s important to American Democracy in a clear and straightforward way, instead of letting our disgracefully self-absorbed politicians continually exploit the differences in interpretation in order to serve theirown personal ambitions and interests.
Now, thanks to this nomination, that valuable piece of real estate, the TV screen, will not be filled with Plamegate 24/7. Instead we get Alito analyses, the suspense about whether there will be a filibuster, etc.
Sen. Leahy already said that it’s too late in the year to look at a new nominee. Adjournment is coming up. No way this choice will be ramrodded through.
This is all about keeping Rove and WH guilt out of the picture.
We should expect other distractions until the public attention span on Plame has expired.
This is it. This is where the Democrats have to step up and spell out how dangerous this guy is. Where they must discredit the religious right, and the politics of corruption. Scalia and Thomas are not only far right, they are corrupt. Time to start digging.
This is a defining moment,and a major challenge and opportunity for Dems to really define themselves to the public. If they blow it, they can kiss 06 goodbye. If they can lead public opinion to where it wants to go, we’ll not only stop this guy, we’ll be on our way to a congressional majority.
There’s no ducking this one. I’m not saying this is what we’ve been waiting for, but it’s here. There’s no escape.
The Miers debacle furnishes common ground for Dems and moderate Repubs to claim: this guy is supported by reactionaries who require an unconstitutional religious test. All questions on Rove v. Wade are legitimate now, thanks to Miers. This is Bork redux, and more.
This isn’t some kind of experiment or exploratory adventure for these people.
They’re taking over the world, starting here. They’ve been working towards this moment for 30 years publicly and longer behind the scenes. All their other strategy and messaging was in service of reaching this moment. Any seeming mistakes–even horrendous blunders–have been worth it for them to gain this choice to make now. These two Justices (so far) will protect the radical right’s rule for a minimum of two generations to come, possibly longer given the prospect of 40 years of further progress in medicine and genetics.
Bush took a crap-shoot with Miers, but I don’t think it was the religious right who balked, it seemed to me to have been the corporatists. Many of them were wondering loudly and publicly what her abortion credentials were, to spook the religious right who would otherwise have been satisfied by Bush’s assurances about her religion.
So the corporatists spanked Bush’s bottom long and hard, and he’s back in line where they need him to actually accomplish something rather than fumble and destroy for them.
Our problem is that a big fraction of the economy and the social institutions down here stand to gain from a radical corporatist government. I don’t think a message exists that Dems or even a 2nd coming of FDR could use to convince Republican powers and moderates to back away from this radicalism.