Daily Ramblings:
The Frist One Now Will Later Be Last ...07/31/2005 10:49:14 pm
It's true; the prospect of using the above title made this post inevitable. Nevertheless, there's a couple of things to say about Senator Frist's change of heart on the issue of embryonic stem cell research (still consistently shortened in the mainstream media to just "stem cell research," which is of-course a non-controversial area of study, where it involves adult or umbilical cord blood cells).
Firstly, (or fristly) before criticizing the Senator's move, one should arrive at some conclusion over his motives for it. Was it a principled act, borne from the Senator's own understanding of medical science (as he keeps reminding us he that he is a doctor)? Or was it an act of political opportunism, with an eye towards the 2008 presidential contest? That is, perhaps an attempt to compete on the same "moderate" ground as someone like John McCain, known unaffectionately in conservative circles as "the New York Times' favorite Republican."
Well, I think we have the answer here, in the fact that Frist leaked his planned speech to none other than the New York Times the day before he gave it - and apparently before he even gave President Bush a heads-up.
Frist knows that John McCain is a formidable candidate whom he is likely to face in the presidential primaries. I think he has made the calculation that he cannot afford to cede the perceived "moderate" ground to Senator McCain. This is his first major attempt to compete on that ground. And it apparently has paid some dividends - as Saturday's glowing editorial in the New York Times attests.
Frist is also likely calculating that it would be of benefit to him in any ultimate general election. As Arlen Specter (that truly awe-inspiring intellect of the U.S. Senate) said today:
"Republicans want to nominate somebody who can be re-elected. And I think the way the matter is pending now, I don't think a presidential candidate opposed to stem cells could be elected."
Thanks, Arlen, for also leaving out the word "embryonic," and so doing your part to perpetuate the confusion surrounding this issue.
It's quite remarkable that Frist made this gambit during the same week that there was news of yet another promising advance in the use of adult stem cells to treat disease - in this case tissue damage caused by heart attacks. A successful study in pigs (apparently the kind that don't exercise regularly and watch their diets) showed that adult stem cells harvested from another pig's marrow could actually restore and repair heart muscle that had been damaged during a heart attack. Human studies are now beginning and results are expected by mid-2006.
The fetishizing of embryonic stem cell research would sometimes make you think that there is simply no other hope or possible avenue of study to treat disease. The truth is obviously quite different. While advances are made in many other areas all the time, no proven treatments have yet come out of embyronic stem cell research, and not for the want of trying by international scientists, as well as private and state funded researchers in the United States. President Bush's prohibition solely applies to the spending of Federal tax dollars on research that "destroys human life," i.e., embryos (21 of whom he invited to the White House as I referred to in a post back here). Of-course, a proven success with embryonic stem cells would not change the underlying moral equation, but it's just worth noting the bizarre situation that currently pertains - where promising research that poses no ethical problems gets ignored, while relative pie-in-the-sky research that is mired with moral dilemmas gets never-ending attention.
Back to Senator Specter, and his "I don't think a presidential candidate opposed to stem cells could be elected" remark. Plugging RWB's back pages once again - six days after the November 2nd, 2004 election there was this post which addressed the curious silence in the media about the failure of one of the cornerstone issues of the Kerry/Edwards ticket; namely, embryonic stem cell research. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, it had been relentlessly brought up by speaker after speaker, with the coup-de-grace being delivered in a typically smarmy performance by the creepy Ron Reagan Jr. Not that it wasn't also emphasized in the candidate's speech. Then Christopher Reeve's death made it front and center for the media again - and who can forget Edwards' bizarre promise to the sick and disabled: "When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
By the way, Senator Frist at the time called Edwards' remarks "crass" and "shameful."
Of-course after the election everyone was talking about those "moral values" voters, but somehow this particular issue, despite its prominence in the Democrats' campaign, didn't make it to the radar screen for the commentators. And now we have Republicans - or at least Arlen Specter - declaring that a presidential candidate would be unelectable unless he takes a position on this which is opposite to the one that President Bush took - Bush being the candidate who garnered over 62 million votes on November 2nd, and whose party increased their majority in both the Senate and House in a virtually unprecedented sweep.
The thing about McCain is that he succeeds in being the NY Times' favorite Republican without seeming to completely emasculate himself in the process. Frist's attempt to woo the liberal elite on embryonic stem cell research, in an effort to win the "moderates," will by contrast define him as a sorry and sad excuse for a Republican leader - because he has no alternate image of strength to fall back upon - and it effectively ends his run for president. Though he probably won't believe it until he's spent quite a few millions of dollars on a failed campaign.
Which will just go to show that his judgment about the politics of embyronic stem cell research is as flawed as his judgment about its ethics.
One Too Many Mornings ...07/31/2005 03:40:17 pm
Absolutely sweet is this version I was lucky enough to hear of One Too Many Mornings, from October 1st, 2000 in Münster, Germany (mp3 sample here for a little while). About 4 1/2 minutes into it, when the verses are through, you can hear Dylan start to pick out a riff on his acoustic guitar. It's a simple, bouncy riff, and a counterpoint to what is an exquisitely poignant song - one of his Great songs, in my humble opinion, from the album The Times They Are A'Changin'
.
He soon stops picking out the riff on his guitar, and then you hear the crowd cheer. I don't think it's because he's stopped playing his guitar, however, but rather because they've seen him pick up his harmonica. He begins blowing, and it's the same riff he had been playing a minute before on guitar, but now the counterpoint is clear, upfront, and - to these ears - completely heartbreaking. He leads it to a soaring finish, and it's just plain wonderful.
This magical moment from just one of the thousands of gigs that Dylan has played in so many little spots all over the world brings to mind for me that curious passage in Chronicles
It's a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and chord changes.
He credits his resorting to this method in the late '80s with revitalizing not only his guitar playing, but his singing. However, he makes clear that it wasn't about wanting to "play lead guitar and wow anybody." In fact, he even says that if his guitar were buried in the mix where only he could hear it, it "might be more effective."
With any type of imagination you can hit notes at intervals and between backbeats, creating counterpoint lines and then you sing off of it. There's no mystery to it and it's not a technical trick. The scheme is for real. For me, this style would be most advantageous, like a delicate design that would arrange the structure of whatever piece I was performing.
Again, I don't know what he's talking about, technically. Some people have laughed about it, and presumed that he's pulling everyone's leg. I think he's well aware that people would react that way, and he wrote this passage in a slightly impish manner. Nevertheless, I also think that he's being forthright. Anyone who's paid close attention to his concert performances of recent years, particularly from the late 90s through the early 00s (before he switched to piano) would have noticed how he often picked out simple lead lines on his acoustic guitar, and on occasion it became pretty clear that his simple riffs were basically taking the song and his band in a specific direction. It always seemed a little odd, considering his talented sidemen, that Dylan would sort of take over with his simple picking - but there's no question that he was busy trying to achieve something.
Is that some of what's going on in this One Too Many Mornings performance? As said, I'm no musicologist, but I tend to think so.
His Back Pages ...07/23/2005 03:20:38 pm
The level of advance publicity for Scorsese's upcoming TV documentary on Dylan, "No Direction Home," is quite something, especially since it's not due to air until late September. This is from the UK's Telegraph:
Roly Keating, the BBC2 controller, said that the 210-minute film promised an "awesome and unique" picture of the singer, covering Dylan's arrival in New York in January 1961 to July 1966, when he became a recluse after a motorcycle crash near his then home in Woodstock, New York.
....
Anthony Wall, editor of Arena, which is showing the film, said that Dylan talks about his recording of Like a Rolling Stone, the six-minute single driven by a circular organ riff, which broke the barrier of the three-minute pop record.
He said: ''If anything, it's an emotional journey. Dylan talks about Joan Baez [his lover during his first UK tour] but doesn't answer questions in the way some artists do."I'm definitely going to watch this when it's on TV, and I hope and expect to enjoy it (despite reservations expressed back here), but why do I find all the advance word to be a bit of yawn? An "awesome and unique picture of the singer." Well ... it's a picture of the already quite well scrutinized period of Dylan's career between 1961 and 1966. A little odd, considering that the PBS banner under which this is being done (American Masters) is customarily a look at an artist's total career, rather than a selected five year snatch of it.
Clearly that period was a tumultous and exciting one, both for Dylan and those that listened to his music, and for the general rock and pop music world that he completely shook up. Yet, I'm a fan who obviously feels that Dylan's work has continued to be intensely interesting and worthwhile through the late sixties, the seventies, and yes the eighties too, and on to today. The difference in the '61 - '66 period is that the changes that his music was going through coincided with rapid changes in popular music and the popular culture generally, and it's fair to say that many had their eyes and ears opened to all kinds of possibilities by Dylan's own personal creative breakthroughs. (Whether very many others actually succeeded in taking Dylan's lead in an interesting and positive direction of their own is another question.)
Dylan continued going through changes, and making matchless music, but after 1966 he let the pop culture zeitgeist bypass him, and obviously he did so quite deliberately. He'd been the unwitting leading edge of that cultural wind; or at the least he'd been perceived as such by others. He was happy after that to plow his own course without the same sense of the rest of the music world waiting breathlessly for his next move.
As he said in an interview in 1999:
Well...you know, you can influence all kinds of people, but sometimes it gets in the way -- especially if somebody is accusing you of influencing somebody that you had no interest in influencing in the first place.
So, in any case, I expect Scorsese will have lots of previously unseen footage, and the new interview material with Dylan himself will inevitably be fascinating, but I've got to wonder a little bit what all the fuss is about. A really big deal is being made of the fact that there's a film clip of the moment in the Manchester Free Trade Hall when someone shouts "Judas" and Dylan responds before smashing into Like A Rolling Stone.Well, I guess that'll be something to see ... but it ain't really all that new, now, is it? Hasn't everyone kind of meditated enough by now on the resonance of that moment? There may be a point at which all this sinks to nostalgia and navel-gazing on the part of the documentarian and the viewers. This should be an opportunity to break from the clichés and use the benefit of distance to paint a truer portrait of the artist - shouldn't it?
Dylan himself recently wrote about his early time in the Village, in Chronicles, of-course. But he didn't get past 1962 in his account - then he jumped forward to the late sixties, and then to the late eighties. Chronicles is a really good book - maybe a great one. It surprised people. It took people aback (as opposed to just taking them back). It's certainly not an exercise in nostalgia. It's a book that really informs and entertains and beguiles. And it does all that without retreading old stories about hecklers in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Dylan tells us more about himself with a story about visiting a curio shop outside New Orleans in 1989 than most critics have told us with all their millions of words about going electric and falling off the motorcycle and on and on and on.
Quite an achievement on Dylan's part. Here's hoping Scorsese achieves something too.
Trouble ...07/22/2005 10:28:38 pm
The headline on this AP story says: London Bombings Trouble Muslim Community. That might lead you to think it's a story about how disturbed and horrified British Muslims are by the band of rabid killers who are murdering in their name. Well, not quite.
LONDON (AP) - Muslims gathered uneasily for afternoon prayers Friday, murmuring about fears of a backlash. A bomb threat forced the evacuation of one of London's largest mosques, and someone dumped gasoline near a suicide bomber's home.
A tremor of apprehension shook Britain's Muslim community of 1.6 million Friday after undercover officers on the London subway shot and killed a man described by witnesses as a South Asian.
The shooting followed a series of small bombings Thursday in which four men placed backpacks of explosives on three trains and a bus. The attacks came two weeks after four suicide bombers killed 52 other people on three London subways and a bus.
``We are getting phone calls from quite a lot of Muslims who are distressed about what may be a shoot-to-kill policy,'' said Inayat Bunglawala, Muslim Council of Britain spokesman.
One caller, he said, asked: ``What if I was carrying a rucksack?''
The concern for the victims of the ongoing attempts at mass murder in Britain is palpable, is it not? And so on, in a piece that is absolutely jaw-dropping both for the points that it makes and the complete unawareness of the AP editor about what points are actually being made (reflected in the absurd choice of headline).
Guner Bahadir, sitting in a prayer room for women, said she felt solidarity with Muslims involved in conflicts around the world, and that with Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, she wasn't surprised by the attacks.
``This is the war, and now it is here,'' said the 40-year-old Bahadir, who immigrated from Turkey five years ago. ``They (the West) say they're helping us, but they're not. They're killing us,'' she said. ``We don't need their help.''
Here is a recent Muslim immigrant, one who left her home in Turkey, in an effort (one must assume) to find better opportunities for herself or for her children in England - better, that is, than the ones that were available in her native land. And what message is she delivering to those who have allowed her to make England her adopted home? "They say they're helping us, but they're not. They're killing us. We don't need their help." They are killing us, she says, of her hosts, as the effort to identify remains from the Islamist suicide bombings two weeks ago continues. And on a day when, at the time of writing, at least 45 people have been killed by presumed Islamic terrorists in the Egyptian tourist resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. And six days after an Islamist suicide bombing in Iraq killed nearly 100 people - largely Muslims, of-course.
In London, reality continues to be an optional accessory for many:
A man in his 50s who immigrated from Pakistan said, ``I am certain one day I will be killed. Many of us feel this.'' He declined to be named because he didn't want to stand out in a community he said was already ``being targeted as a scapegoat.''
The community that is producing suicide bombers, failing to organize to stop the cancer within itself, and in many cases, as illustrated here, justifying their actions after the fact is merely a scapegoat, you see. No actual connection to what's going on.
At least one British Muslim that the AP managed to find condemns the bombers:
``This is not Islam,'' Qari Asim, imam of the Makkah mosque in Leeds, insisted during Friday prayers as he condemned ``cowardly'' suicide bombers.
``People are angry at the people who did it,'' he told The Associated Press, referring to the bombings. ``People were living peacefully, and now it's just a tension.''.
But.
But he said police used excessive force in the London subway on Friday.
``They didn't need to shoot him five times. They could have shot him once or twice, maybe in the leg, so that he couldn't get away,'' Asim said.
Right - those sharp-shooting cops could have just winged him and cut a few choice ligaments. Except suicide bombers aren't interested in getting away, are they? They're interested in getting into a crowd, detonating their explosive, and spraying the limbs and blood of innocent people on the walls.
That headline again: London Bombings Trouble Muslim Community.
Addendum: The news that the man who was shot was apparently not a terrorist is tragic, but of-course does not change the facts of what the police believed themselves to be dealing with at the time.
I Wish I Was On Some Australian Mountain Range ...07/21/2005 10:32:16 pm
Australia's estimable Prime Minister John Howard, was, of-course, right today when he said the following - and it is rightly being picked up by many people, though not nearly enough:
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq; and could I remind you that the 11 September occurred before the operation in Iraq; can I also remind you that the very first occasion that Bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor.
He also said something that I'm not so sure about, though there is truth in it:
Could I just add that one of the difficulties that all societies face here is that essentially the laws dealing with the behaviour of terrorists were framed at a time when terrorists didn't have available to them the technology, access for how to make a bomb from the internet, mobile phones, text messages. To I hope not over-simplify it, we have 19th century legal responses to potentially 21st century technological terrorist capacity.
There's no question that the threat posed by today's Islamic terrorism is of a completely different nature than previous terrorist threats, and on a completely different level of seriousness. Technology - i.e. our Western infidel technology which they enjoy and use against us - is a factor in that, without a doubt. However, there has long existed the technology to kill lots of people, particularly defenseless civilians. It's not hard.
The simple truth is that the 20th century terrorism with which Europeans are familiar (and which they never tire of reminding us naïve Americans about) was never aimed at causing mass death. The terrorists' objectives - as immoral as their actions may have been - were slightly more nuanced than merely the killing of hundreds, or thousands, of people. Their actions were tied to specific political objectives - albeit generally warped ones. In plotting their attacks, they calibrated the damage, the potential loss of life, and the targets themselves, with an eye not towards causing universal fury - which would damage their cause - but rather with an eye towards drawing media and political attention to their grievances and exercising leverage - often in an economic sense.
A good example of this is the oft-mentioned-in-this-context IRA. "Red" Ken Livingstone today said:
"Those people whose memories stretch back to the terrorist campaigns in the '70s and '80s and early '90s will remember the very often horrifying bombings in London, often only weeks apart. And we got through that, and we will get through this."
The IRA's objective was (is?) driving the British out of Northern Ireland - among other things. From around 1969 through 1998 they waged a campaign of terrorist attacks. Though they were responsible for the deaths of civilians - notably a 1974 Birmingham pub bombing which killed 19 - the great majority of their attacks were directed at British and Northern Irish security forces, and political leaders (Lord Mountbatten; the 1984 Conservative Party conference; MP Ian Gow in 1990; many British soldiers and Northern Irish police officers).
Many of their attacks on the British mainland were literally "phoned-in." They would plant devices in a public place, e.g. a department store, and then call in a warning to the British police, who would have minutes to clear the area or risk civilian deaths. Callous and incredibly reckless, to be sure. But it suited their objectives to simply make the point that they could do such things. Killing hundreds of people would undoubtedly have initiated a crack down of epic proportions and complete loss of sympathy with their cause. As it was, they carried on for 3 decades; they had (and still have) a political "wing" called Sinn Fein who operate openly without fear of arrest, and they still have not been defeated in any military sense, though they have danced the strange dance of the Northern Ireland peace process for the last several years.
Those people who, like Ken Livingstone, compare the current Islamofascist onslaught to the IRA: I wonder if they can imagine a situation where these terrorists would telephone in a warning? The very concept is enough to spark bitter laughter. How would such a call go?
Hello! Infidel British police! You have 3 seconds to clear Harrods! Not enough time for you? Well, too bad for all the crusader zionists and the Jew descendants of pigs and monkeys that are dying right now! Allah Akbar!
Here's a point of comparison that illustrates the difference between the IRA and the Islamic Jihadists: On the 15th of August, 1998, in an incident that is widely considered the worst in the history of the Northern Irish troubles, 29 people were killed by a bomb in Omagh, County Tyrone. A warning had in fact been phoned-in, but it was botched with inaccurate information on the target, whether accidentally or intentionally. The horror that this bombing caused across all spectrums of the Northern Irish community made it effectively impossible for the IRA to continue their "military" campaign even if they wanted to (though the bombing was actually the work of a splinter group calling themselves the "Real IRA, " who themselves announced a cessation of activities shortly afterwards). The IRA's own assumed base of support - the Catholic Nationalist community in Northern Ireland - was filled with revulsion at the deaths of so many civilians, including 9 children. It demonstrated that the IRA and their fellow travelers could only function by keeping their violence restrained at a certain level. Mass death - even on the scale of 29 people - was simply not something that their own supposed supporters could stomach.
Contrast that, if you will, with the reaction of Al-Qaeda's natural base of supporters to the lurid and horrifying murder of nearly 3000 people in New York's World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Lest we forget, it prompted literal dancing in the streets in the West Bank, and expressions of joy and pride from Cairo to Islamabad and beyond. No, not from the political leaders, but from many real people across the world who provide Al-Qaeda and their ilk with a crucial foundation of moral if not logistical support.
In other words, Al-Qaeda did not hurt themselves with their own supporters by carrying out mass murder live on television. And they did not hurt themselves with their own supporters by killing 56 in London two weeks ago. And it is all but certain that they would not hurt themselves with their own supporters were they to succeed in murdering thousands more crusader zionists, and pigs and monkeys.
This is the crucial difference between 20th century European terrorism and 21st century Islamic terrorism. The goal of the Jihadist is to kill a whole lot of people - as many as possible. Precisely because they regard non-believers as not deserving to live, and precisely because they believe that if they die while killing such vermin they themselves can earn eternal happiness and non-stop sex with dozens of virgins - so the killing of non-believers is in fact an end in itself.
This is far from anything that Ken Livingstone has had to deal with before - and his failure to recognize it would make me nervous if I were a Londoner. It is one thing to bravely ride the Tube each day and face down this unprecedented evil. It is another to have one's political leaders dismiss it as something that's old hat - been there, done that, no big deal. Livingstone and others who believe that and propagate it are gravely in error. It is to be hoped that their blindness will not have a cost too great to bear.
The Hangin' Judge Came In Unnoticed ...07/20/2005 10:21:14 pm
Good thinking, Ann (Coulter: Souter In Roberts Clothing). Convince the Left that we're scared John Roberts is just another liberal-elitist-in-waiting - that once on the court he'll see himself as the lord and benefactor of "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe" and will conjure up new fundamental rights to order and flush reason, logic and that yellowed piece of paper we call the U.S. Constitution right down the sewer (in other words continue business-as-usual at the U.S. Supreme Court). If enough conservatives say that's what they're afraid of, it should dampen whatever momentum the loony left - otherwise known as the Democratic Party, circa 2005 - is attempting to gather in opposing Judge Roberts.
Well, actually Ann's points are well taken. In essence, she's saying Republican Presidents don't have a great track record at nominating "stealth" candidates, and that people who've never expressed strong conservative opinions aren't crypto-conservatives - they're liberals, a lá David Souter and Anthony Kennedy. She believes we've reached the point where we should relish an all-out fight for an unabashedly conservative nominee. We have the House, the Senate and the Presidency, so, guess what: the American people are clearly on board with all this. Let's get the kind of judge the President was elected to nominate.
I sympathize with that mode of thinking and I'd be fully behind a Janice Rogers Brown (or how about a renominated Robert Bork?). However, I think Ann's pessmism is misplaced, albeit well earned.
I happen to to believe that when it came to picking a Supreme Court nominee, President Bush didn't have to weigh what he needed to do to "mollify his base," as some talking-head media observers theorized. On this issue, he is the base. He has been direct and unabashed about what kind of judge he would nominate, from the debates during the 2000 election onward. He has been waiting for the moment to be able to do exactly what he said he would do.
I certainly don't know John Roberts, and I won't pretend I've been able to figure him out in 24 hours of Googling. All over the media, right now, people are debating who he really is. Ted Kennedy was up bright and early asking, literally, "Whose side is he on?" (In that he put his finger right on the problem in that uncanny and unintentional way of his: the Supreme Court is now seen not as a place where brilliant legal minds uphold our consitution, but rather as a mud-wrestling tournament of naked partisans.)
People will be taking this comment by Roberts and that footnote and the other memo and extrapolating one way or another to discern his future decisions. It's safe to expect that he himself will give little away during the confirmation hearings about how he would vote on one issue or another, despite the best efforts of Senator Schumer et al.. So, not only do I not know John Roberts now - I don't expect to have 100% personal certainty about his disposition on the key issues before he is confirmed. However, what I do feel confident about is that Dubya watched the mistakes that his father made in this area, and indeed watched the mistakes that Ronald Reagan made, and has been personally determined not to make the same mistakes. He is determined to shift the balance of the U.S. Supreme Court, in the way that Reagan failed to do because of Democratic opposition and Republican weak knees, and in the way that his father failed to do because of (arguably) a lack of true ambition to do so - a fatal lack of that "vision thing."
Dubya doesn't lack that vision thing. He is certainly not immune to strategic compromises in order to defuse opposition and focus his capital on the things that matter most to him - see the Campaign Finance bill as one example, and a sickening one to be sure. But anyone who thinks that such compromises aren't made by every President - including the very best ones - hasn't read history and may be looking at politics more like religion than the very messy bloodsport it really is.
You have to know when to plant your flag and when to give up a hill in the interests of taking the mountain. In Dubya's case, it is clear to this observer that the Supreme Court is a mountain that matters. The culture of life - to take one example of an issue that the Supreme Court is crucial to - is not just something Bush speaks about to hear himself talk. It's in his veins and it's why he ran for President; on this issue he is the base.
Whether it came down to his personal interview with Roberts - and I think that it did - or the research that his most trusted people performed, I think that President Bush is convinced that John Roberts will be among those on the court who believe that the Constitution only protects us when we protect it; when we treat its words as meaning what they say, and when we regard its written articles as written law - and not as a canvas on which to paint our short-sighted whims and end up drawing nothing more than a map of our own destruction.
Call me naïve, but this was a fundamental reason why I supported Bush in 2000 - and, though there were certainly ample additional reasons to vote for him again in 2004, he had given me no reason doubt that he retained his core beliefs in this area. I'm far from thinking that I threw my vote away, just because Dubya has nominated someone that the Democrats will have trouble getting traction against.
The way I figure it, I'm finally getting what I voted for back in November of 2000 - and it feels pretty darned good.
Addendum 07/21/2005 08:54:25 am: Don't miss Iowahawk's essential call-to-arms: He Or She Is The Wrong Man Or Woman For The Court.
John Roberts: Great Choice ...07/19/2005 09:55:16 pm
And perfectly consistent with what RWB wrote back here ... so Bob Is Right again. Chuck Schumer and Pat Leahy have even less of leg to stand on than usual with regard to this nominee, but that doesn't mean there won't be a lot of hopping taking place. They will try to argue that a Sandra Day O'Connor needs to be replaced with a clone, in terms of judicial philosophy, but they will ultimately fall on their face. The wild card to watch is Arlen Specter. It's unbelievable that the guy who proved himself both the country's worst legal mind and the most spineless Republican, during the Bork hearings in 1987, would end up chairing the Judiciary Committee at this crucial moment. Blame it on a simple twist of fate.
Kudos also to Dubya for skipping the gender replacement theory of judicial nominations. Don't worry, NOW and co.: When John Paul Stevens retires, we'll give you Janice Rogers Brown.
So, all is well, despite the fireworks to come. There's rarely been a fight more worth having. I'll say it one more time: Bring it on.
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