Heretical Thoughts on the Supreme Court

The guy is going to get confirmed.

Bush did exactly the right thing: chose the lawyer with excellent credentials and a minimal paper trail. Sure there's the quote on Roe, and the wife who's a board member of Feminists for Life, and the nasty decision on the twelve-year-old girl and the french fry, and the consistently anti-environment/pro-business decisions, but all of that is pretty tame, not the kind of stuff that derails a nomination. Unless they find a literal skeleton in his closet (i.e. discover that he was having an affair with the crack-smoking nanny and then murdered her so she wouldn't reveal that he hadn't paid her taxes), he's in.

Which makes me seriously question why we are spending so much money (for some reason eighteen million dollars is the number stuck in my head, and I think that's only for one organization) trying to beat him. This whole thing makes the Democrats and progressive organizations look like exactly the kind of nit-picking, never-satisfied ideologues the Republicans want us to look like. If the goal is to let them know how we feel, well, they already know and they don't care. And that's a lot of money that could instead be spent on an issue that has some real political viability. Like electing Democratic senators in 2006. Or ending the war.

Can't we please, for once, be as strategic as they are? (Look at how Roberts did indeed push Rove right off the front page and out the back door.)