i'm i the only one having this much fun...

[acroyear]

...watching the intellectual conservatives foam at the mouth over finally realizing this president never represented them at all, but only represents the religious right and the robber-baron mentality of big oil and mass media?

at last we are finally seeing the cracks in the wall of the modern unholy alliance emerging.

(now all we need is for extreme liberals like Dean and Hillary to keep their mouths shut for 5 minutes, lest the various "right"s suddenly reunite against their common foe...)

Comments

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Not that I want to start an argument, but frankly, I've never thought of Hillary as an "extreme liberal." She's staked out any number of positions to the right of the progressives in the party.

On another note regarding the Miers nomination: even the Founding Fathers are against it.

As David Sirota pointed out in his blog:

Just look at the Federalist Papers, #76, in which Alexander Hamilton discusses why the founding fathers gave the U.S. Senate the power to confirm - or reject - the President's Supreme Court nominees:

"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment..."

The passage gets even more specific about political cronies like Miers:

"[The President] would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure."

Let me translate: the framers thought that the mere existence of the U.S. Senate's advise and consent powers should deter a President from nominating someone like Miers in the first place. The incredibly arrogant Bush administration has shown us that's not the case. Even so, the message is still clear: the framers wanted the U.S. Senate to reject nominees like Miers, just like they rejected Democratic nominees like Abe Fortas on the same grounds of cronyism. They wanted, in short, a truly independent judiciary - not one that serves at the pleasure of any one President.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

i don't think of hillary as an "extreme liberal" either, but she certainly is to the right-wing representatives of the punditacracy.

if she opens her mouth, ALL sides of the right like to argue with it -- as such, she's a liability to the left when we have times like this where the various rights are in disagreement.

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Just remember: ANYONE who gets the Democratic nomination is always painted as "an extreme liberal." They've been doing it since Reagan made it a bad word. Mondale: liberal. Dukakis: liberal. Clinton: liberal liberal liberal.

It has nothing to do with the political spectrum; it's the right taking advantage of the fact that they've managed to give the word a bad connotation in the minds of the average non-thinking voter. And the right-wing punditocracy goes along with it, because it's in their best interest. Take a look at how they all now refer to the "Democrat party." Frank Luntz did polling on it in the 80s, and found that it sounds harsher and reflects more negatively -- and so the GOP, both pundits and politicians, have adopted it virtually whole-hog now.

[fiona64.livejournal.com]

It was great fun to watch Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan flip their wigs about their former hero, the Shrub. Gotta love it.