Surprise SCOTUS Nominee Has Both Sides Guessing

Hello, I'm an ordinary citizen. I'd like to interject a word here, and that word is "shutthefuckup".

I've been wonked from all sides on the Miers nomination. I was already fed up with the mass media "Both Sides Gearing Up For Nomination Fight" bullshit. They've had that crap in the morgue for years waiting for vacancies, and it seemed to make no difference after the Roberts nomination was announced that the entire left side of the aisle didn't go into patchouli-induced paroxysms. Even once it was obvious that the Democrats were, take your pick: a) playing a subtle game; b) acting out of principle; or c) willing to sell out reproductive rights and concern for the environment so long as their incumbents stood a chance of re-election, we were handed the same script. This is the distinction between political punditry and sportswriting. When I was a lad sportswriting as an institution was racist and sexist to the core. There weren't any black head coaches or pro quarterbacks because everybody knew blacks just weren't smart enough, and as for women, well, who wanted to see them play sports? Now, granted they've been smacked upside the head, repeatedly, with how wrong they were, but the vast majority now admit it. Sportswriters were among the loudest opponents of Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook and their overt racism. You didn't hear any of the apologias you heard for Trent Lott or hear now for Bill Bennett. Meanwhile, as the punditocracy is proved wrong over and over again, they simply demand that the facts change.

As for the Right, well, this is your boy. Jesus put him in the Oval Office at such a critical time, right? Support Our President, You Effing Traitors, wasn't that the way it went? So, put it between two pieces of bread and eat it. You've been willing to corrupt the entire system in pursuit of a single issue, an issue which has only one solution, ethically, morally, philosophically, and legally: letting women decide what they will do with their bodies. There's no excuse for the ugly rhetoric of the past thirty years, let alone the support for threats, intimidation, even murder, in the name of "Life". You did not have the courage to confront the fact that most Americans disagree with you. You'd rather engender a meaningless fight over stem cell research, and do real harm to real living things, than grant that the entire weight of the argument is against you.

That's not to say that I imagine Roberts or Miers will support the status quo. Like anyone who feels passionately about it I'm just left to hope. And that's not cause for a celebration. I understand that Democrats now find themselves a minority, but perhaps if they hadn't waited for polls to tell them it was time to grow spines we'd be in less trouble now. Bush is the weakest President in modern times, and he may be the subject of a prosecution which could wind up before the same Court that put him in the White House in the first place. That's plenty enough reason right there to delay confirming any nominee without a track record of backing the law, not her party. Especially one with nothing to recommend her beyond the fact that she's not an obvious screaming radical. Remember how many people said, watching that disaster unfold on the streets of New Orleans, that they couldn't believe this was America? Is the nomination of a non-entity to the highest court in the land a step up from that?