Rarely have I enjoyed reading the New York Times as much as today, with their post-mortem on the Alito hearings: Democrats See Wide Bush Stamp on Court System.

Disheartened by the administration’s success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation’s judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said that the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they were taking the courts too far to the right.

Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.

The most gratifying part of reading this is the confirmation that not only have the Democrats been beaten badly, but they still have no idea as to why. Their inability to understand why Alito’s “written record of opposition to abortion rights” didn’t stir popular outrage is a perfect case in point. They live in a world of delusion—reinforced by their friends at the New York Times and elsewhere—where a poll that shows a majority of Americans being opposed to the overturning of Roe v. Wade is taken to mean that the same majority of Americans consider the preservation of unlimited abortion rights to be a very good and desirable thing. Of-course it means nothing like that. The great majority of people who provide an answer to a question like that in a poll have little idea what the full implication of the legal ruling in Roe v. Wade actually is. Ask people more specific questions about abortion—as other polls have—and you find a majority approving of a variety of limits on what has been in practice the unlimited abortion license of Roe.

In other words, ask people questions which they understand, and you have a better chance of divining their true opinion. (Liberal pollsters tend to be more interested in just getting the “correct” result, of-course, as in the notorious exit polling on November 2nd, 2004.) The knee-jerk negative response to the question of overturning Roe v. Wade just reflects the inherent conservatism of the average person, who has been given to believe that this would be a cataclysmic event, when, in actuality, it would just return the issue of abortion rights to the state capitols, where the very kinds of limits that ordinary people support could be effected.

And the New York Times piece provides more examples of Democrats wallowing in delusion.

Several Democrats expressed frustration that Republicans outmaneuvered them by drawing attention to an episode on Wednesday when Mr. Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, began crying as her husband was being questioned. That evening, senior Democratic senate aides convened in a basement room of the Dirksen Senate Office Building stunned at the realization that the pictures of a weeping Mrs. Alito were being broadcast across the nation - as opposed to, for example, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressing Judge Alito about his membership in a Princeton alumni club that resisted affirmative action efforts.

“Had she not cried, we would have won that day,” said one Senate strategist involved in the hearings …

It’s hilarious that they think that. As said in this space the other day, “Ted Kennedy seems to still think he can throw a few minutes of histrionics out there and drown out the reality he is flailing against.” Even in the absence of Alito’s wife crying, Kennedy’s few minutes of over-the-top harangueing about a clearly anomalous triviality in Alito’s past would have been seen for what it was, and would not have swayed anybody who mattered. That has a lot more to do with the new and more balanced media world that currently exists than with the tears of Martha-Ann.

And for genuine fall-out-of-your-chair-laughter, you can’t beat this from Senator Ted himself:

Mr. Kennedy said the nomination process, and particularly the hearings, had “turned into a political campaign,” and that the White House had proved increasingly skilled in turning that to its advantage.

“These issues are so sophisticated - half the Senate didn’t know what the unitary presidency was, let alone the people of Boston,” he said, referring to one of the legal theories that was a focus of the hearings. “I’m sure we could have done better.”

“But what has happened is that this has turned into a political campaign,” he said. “The whole process has become so politicized that I think the American people walk away more confused about the way these people stand.”

Kennedy complaining that the Senate confirmation process has become too politicized! Again, we have reality that is indistinguishable from Iowahawk parody.

Ted Kennedy, more than any other single senator, has made a maxim out of the idea that standard qualifications, like judicial experience and peer recognition, are secondary to what a nominee thinks about the political hot-button issues that might come before the Court. For decades, he more than anyone has helped make the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees the political circus it has become.

Next, I guess he’ll be complaining that there’s too many burnt-out liberal dinosaurs from Massachusetts, with more money than brains, slowing down the business of the Senate.

How sweet it is.

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