Down with the ship….

One thing that’s always funny to me about judicial nominees and the whole messy, partisan process of getting them seated is how the side out of power (now the conservatives) rails endlessly about how awfully liberal/conservative the nominee is.  Or, as Morrisey has it in this purely slime-ridden Malkin post (pardon my redundancy):

“After the dust settles, the court will be in exactly the same position as it is now, but in the meantime the GOP will have had an opportunity to show Obama as no post-partisan moderate but as a liberal idealogue. Elections do have consequences — and so do appointments.”

Which will mean exactly what? What are these consequences precisely?  A 60 seat majority in the Senate smacks of real, hard power, whereas Obama being revealed as “no post-partisan moderate” is just more stupid jargon from the right.  By the way, do Republicans have anything other than sloganeering up their sleeves?  It appears less and less likely that they do.  Oh how the American public will be shocked (shocked I say!) when they discover that Obama is – gasp – a  liberal! Did  you know he’s also a Muslim who was born – not in Hawaii as his birth certifcate shows – but in Iran (or was it Noth Korea?)

Of course Obama is a liberal (though neither Muslim nor North Korean) but I hardly think that matters to most Americans these days.  I think that conservatism (or at least what is associated with conservatism these days) carries a more damning stigma at this point in time.  All this nonsense about American being a “center-right” nation is just politics as usual.  Even if it is true it’s not a “center-right” nation in the vision of the GOP (as the stats continue to tell us).

I suppose when there is so little good going for a movement, said movement has very few options left open to it short of pushing out Senators and championing systematic torture programs.

Oh, and I thought of this bit of irony the other day.  The Republican Party as it was known once upon a time was of a much more genteel, elitist and intellectually honest variety.  But, the party of Prescott (and later George H. W.) Bush was effectively (and herein lies the irony) torpedoed by none other then the successor to that family name, George W.  How extraordinarily dramatic is it that the heir, the prodigal son, would so totally eradicate what his father and grandfather helped to create?  The latter Bush took neoliberalism and supply side economics (or what his father called “voodoo economics”) as championed by Reagan to their natural and devestating outcome.

And the rest of the GOP, it would appear, are going down with the ship.  Well, not Specter, whose pragmatic shift to the Democratic Party may yet save him….