I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.

Bye

The knee-jerk stance of the Democrats - that anything that Bush does will be wrong - has seriously injured their cause. This is one of the reasons I left the Democratic Party. In the eighties, Reagan used to worry me more than Bush does today… until the Soviet Union collapsed, which caused me to reassess the effects of American politics. The anti-Reagan reaction was pretty much the same knee-jerk reaction we see today in Democrats. The party simply reacts, and offers old ideas based on old ideologies.

Clinton was a surprise, and a reassurance. I was definitely pro-Clinton. However, the lesson of that era is that even with a benign internationalist like Clinton, anti-American bigotry all over the world will not change. So it really doesn’t matter which party’s candidate becomes president, as long as he is not weak, and is not afraid to use power when it needs to be used. That was the main reason I voted against John Kerry: he was too much in line with European thinking.

Miers left a bad impression on the social conservatives but Alito’s religious credentials are to the taste of even the more extreme among the religious right. That he’s experienced and articulate and ready to drive through the Christian agenda in the court makes the situation even doubly more juicy from a Christian Nation perspective.

The Democrats counted that they added to the force of the religious right had the votes to “Bork” Miers (Christian Conservative Robert Bork was blocked by the Democrats in 1987 with the help of moderate Republicans). They forgot that they can only block nominations with the help of the Christian Right but they can never, ever unify with them on a common candidate to the Court. The rest of the Republican Party, on the other hand, vote against the Christian Right only in that rare occasion when the President is on their side. Now that the President chose to pick the darling of the religious right, he will automatically get the Republican majority in the Senate behind Alito.

For the Dems the defeat of the religious right in the SCOTUS issue was the only feasible outcome, since they do care about the right to privacy. The only way to do that would have been for Democratic Senators to go with Bush and confirm Miers regardless of her downsides. Yes it is extraordinary to appoint someone who is not a judge but it is not unconstitutional. Appointing judges is nowadays the rule but not so in the past. It was not conclusively proven that Miers is a bad lawyer to begin with. Anyway, she was a secular lawyer. Alito is more likely to prefer the word of the Bible to the word of the Constitution, if any conflict should arise.

Getting Miers replaced by Alito was the biggest triumph of the religious right so far. With the help of the Democratic Party they defeated the President who thought he was actually pleasing the majority of the people of the United States by NOT appointing a Scalia clone, how much he had in his campaign rhetoric underlined that he prefers such a candidate above all else.

The decision to appoint Alito makes the wise words of former Senator John Danforth, a Christian priest himself, ring all the more true:

http://www.republicanmainstreet.org/News/154.htm

http://scalito.com

http://billmon.org/archives/002320.html

Apparently there is a problem with women secretly getting pregnant behind their husbands back?