Let the Judicial Sliming Begin...

By all counts, on his second try this go-round, President Bush has nominated a superbly qualified judge to fill the second of two Supreme Court openings that occurred suddenly this summer. Conservative true-believers, fearing another Souter fiasco, simply wouldn't accept W's word that his initial nominee for Justice O'Connor's seat, Harriet Miers, would fit the bill. Her lack of a discernable paper trail, like Souter's, would end up badly for them, so they reasoned, by allowing the seating of yet another stealth liberal who might complete the destruction of America begun so long ago by the Warren Court. And right at the point where Republicans were about to achieve total victory: a clear majority on the Supreme Court and a turning back, at last, of ruinous judicial activism and expansionism. Tantalus himself never had it so bad.

There was no hard evidence to back this point of view, of course, but it's hard for anyone on the right (including Wonker in the end) to get past the continuing bitterness that is the Souter debacle. And in a way, you can't blame 'em. Fool me twice, shame on me...

So now Judge Samuel Alito steps up to the plate. He gives the True Believers what they were hoping for--a demonstrably strict-constructionist track record, a willingness to dissent, and a guy who'll inspire the troops for a fight with the lefties and an up-or-down vote. But Republicans had best be careful what they wish for. It will get ugly. And True Believers might soon find themselves longing for the opacity of a Harriet Miers with her lack of a discernable paper trail. When the attack dogs of the left and their house propagandists rev up the negativity, rest assured that the pristine precincts of Capitol Hill will begin to resemble the fly-infested unisex restroom of a rural service station that's gone without a cleaning since 1920.

The sliming has already begun. On the heels of needlessly provocative remarks by Vermont's Senator-for-Life Patrick Leahy, we discover on Townhall.com a simply charming collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) hit-factoids dating, apparently, from this summer past. They're proposed as talking points whose sole purpose is to caricature the new nominee with a raft of blatant distortions and slanders that have even party aparatchik-disguised-as-journalist Chris Matthews upset. Read it all here. What's most interesting in this document is the DNC's casual, racist smearing of this upstanding Italian-American (and Catholic) nominee. (Wonker thought that only Republicans could be racists.)

From the time of the Popular Front through the era of the New Left and beyond, open and closet Marxists alike have sought to topple the United States in slow motion by eroding its legal, moral, religious, and educational structures while propagandizing and justifying these moves in the media, literature, and the arts. Losing the Supreme Court could prove a serious blow to this longterm strategy, and the left can be expected to engage in a fight to the death.

Fans of the film "Animal House" may recall Dean Vernon Wormer's opinion of Delta House:

"I hate those guys."

Yep.