Having exposed the mental instability of one liberal journalist in yesterday's edition of SDPolitics, its only fair to point out that sober and reasonable souls do still trod the uncomfortable ground to our left. Colbert I. King has the good sense to point out that it is not the Republican's shrewd strategy over the last couple months that is responsible for John Robert's strong position in the upcoming confirmation battle.
If John Roberts is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, as now seems likely -- barring a shocker in his record or his past -- the reasons he made it won't be solely his résumé or the support of President Bush. The groundwork for Roberts's elevation to the high court -- and the likelihood of success for future Bush Supreme Court nominees -- was laid nearly three years ago in Georgia, Minnesota and Missouri, and last November in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota, when Republicans captured eight Democratic Senate seats. Today, with Republicans holding 55 seats and having a good chance of landing the votes of some Democrats, the White House enters the Supreme Court fights in excellent shape.
King's argument is that the Democrats focused too much time and energy on winning the White House, and not enough on winning South Dakota.
The presidency, in their view, is the instrument to make the way straight and easy for all who wage war against the heathen right. So, lo these many years, they have been spending millions of dollars and consuming time and energy treading the primary roads that they hoped would take them to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Meanwhile, far beyond the presidential trails, Republicans have been picking off Democrats on the Hill one by one, making it possible for George W. Bush to fulfill his upfront pledge to govern America from the right, where tax cuts, changing the face of the federal judiciary and making liberals perfectly miserable every waking moment remain the order of the day.
I'm not sure that King is being fair to the Democrats. They surely did try valiantly to save the seat of one Tom Daschle, and I doubt that a lot more attention would have helped. But since his argument fits one of my pet theories, I'll ignore the caveat.
The pathological loathing for Bush that infects such as Chait and Frank Rich indeed seems to have bent their minds around the single object of humiliating George Bush. Rich peddles the ridiculous theory that the Robert's nomination was timed to take attention away from the Plame pseudo scandal, which again, he argues, is only a cover for the real story: how the Bush administration lied our way into the Iraq war. But Rich can almost taste Bush's coming humiliation.
When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own.
This fits Colbert King's argument pretty well. A liberal elite that can only see a Supreme Court nomination as a smoke screen for events that happened two years ago has little energy left for anything so vulgar as the present moment.
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