Look, I despise Bush and his henchmen as much as the rest of you guys, and I, too, get disgusted when the Dems can't seem to mount a coherent opposition. But I think Armando's posts on the Roberts nomination (and many of the comments that follow in the threads) have really begun to defy basic logic.
In the front-page diary earlier today, one commenter wrote: "Bush could have nominated an acceptable candidate this time, but didn't."
Hello? What would be an "acceptable" candidate? Face it, George W. Bush is not going to nominate a moderate, pro-choice, pro-civil rights, pro-environment, anti-business judge to the Supreme Court. While that would be "acceptable" to those of us on this board, this is the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney bunch we're talking about here -- I don't understand why there is ANY expectation on the Left that they will put up a so-called "consensus" candidate. Not gonna happen.
The sad fact of the matter is, the Idiot-in-Chief won re-election (probably with the help of Dibold and Ken Blackwell, but there's nothing we can do about that now). The ignorant sheep inexplicably gave him another term, and one of the powers that gave him was to nominate SCOTUS justices that obviously share his philosophy. We are setting our expectations way too high here if we expect this president to do otherwise.
I don't like Roberts. I'd rather he not be confirmed. But this is what happens when a right-wing president is given the key to the Oval Office, and unless the nominee is the devil incarnate -- which I don't see in this case -- then let's focus our attention on something we can really control, like TAKING BACK THE HOUSE AND SENATE IN THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTIONS AND REGAINING CONTROL OF THIS GOVERNMENT AND THIS COUNTRY.
Democrats trashing our own at every turn ain't gonna get us there, folks. It just ain't.