The Return of Three-Dot Monte

Here are some odds and ends that I either don't have the time to flesh out into full-fledged posts or lack the inclination. Which is which, I'll never tell.

***In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger correctly traces hard-left intransigence on President Bush's appellate court nominations back to the 2000 Florida Insurrection.

As I've commented in recent days, Dems hatched a plan after Al Gore's agonizing defeat that was predicated on the myth of Bush "stealing" that election and his resulting presidency therefore being "illegitimate." On this basis did they proceed without restraint to do everything short of assassination or violent overthrow of the federal government to bring down Dubya and his party along with him. And that was to be a formality based upon the accompanying myth that GDub was a "moron" who would be easy pickings in 2004. Therefore, as it pertained to judges, they would just filibuster all the appellate and SCOTUS picks until Bush could be ousted. In short, steal his presidency as he had "stolen" Gore's.

But, of course, it didn't work out that way. So Democrats applied the same mythology to Bush's 2004 re-election, even though that victory was in both the popular and Electoral votes and garnered a majority. And they're carrying on the same blockade even though they no longer have the numbers in the Senate to sustain it.

Henninger concludes:

If the Democratic argument takes root, then elections themselves have lost legitimacy in the American system. They no longer have relevance to a President's ability or right to govern. We won't let you govern because we do not admit the legitimacy of your victory. This is a radical position.

***Victor Davis Hanson pens another uniquely insightful column at NRO that sagely dissects the pathologies of the Extreme Media and Afghani Islamists. Money quote:

Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.

The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."

And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.

How truly sad.

***Also in Friday's NRO, Christopher Brown examines something I've believed about the ongoing crisis with North Korea for a long time: that, far from Red China being a partner in bringing Pyongyang to heel, the ChiComms are using the Kim regime as a catspaw to manipulate the United States to their own nefarious ends. Which points to the folly of any negotiations with North Korea and the need to frankly and openly acknowledge the sober reality that the PRC is, shall we say, neither a "partner" nor a "friendly" power.

***Ed Whelan, infringing a bit on Senator John Cornyn's gimmick, continues his "What's My Line?" series on left-wing extremist judges that were not filibustered by Senate Republicans when first appointed. Friday's edition was especially choice:

Imagine, if you will, that a Democrat President nominated a judge whose constitutional and policy views were, by any measure, on the extreme left fringes of American society.

Let’s assume, for example, that this nominee had expressed strong sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution as well as a constitutional right to polygamy.

Let’s say, further, that he had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and that he had proposed abolishing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parent’s Day.

And, to get really absurd, let’s add that he had called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women.

Let’s further posit that this nominee had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employer’s work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then, lo and behold, to make this nominee even more of a parody of an out-of-touch leftist, let’s say it was discovered that while operating his own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among his more than 50 hires.

Imagine, in sum, a nominee whose record is indisputably extreme and who could be expected to use his judicial role to impose those views on mainstream America. Surely such a person would never be nominated to an appellate court. Surely no Senate Democrat would support someone with such extreme views. And surely Senate Republicans, rather than deferring to the nominating power of the Democrat President, would pull out all stops—filibuster and everything—to stop such a nominee.

Well, not quite. The hypothetical nominee I have just described is, in every particular except his sex, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the time she was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993.

President Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg on June 22, 1993. A mere six weeks later, on August 3, 1993, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a 96-3 vote.

I have to admit wondering at the time why Republicans didn't put up greater resistance to such genuinely "out of the mainstream" judicial appointments, including, yes, filibusters. Now we have our answer: Republicans respect the outcome of elections. Democrats only do when they win them. Which illustrates just how ironic their party name has become.

***Did you know that when President Reagan signed legislation in April 1983 to bring senators and representatives into Social Security, then-Representative Harry Reid immediately introduced legislation to help congressmen escape what he now insists is history’s “most successful program”? Kudos to NRO's Deroy Murdock for this latest layer in the tapestry of Donk hypocrisy on this front-burner issue.

***I wondered if something like this hadn't been floated at some point:

It was inevitable that John Bolton's nomination would get caught up in the Democrats' desperate attempts not to become superfluous to the legislative and advise-and-consent process.

According to several Democratic staffers on the Foreign Relations Committee, talk inside their offices had Sen. Joe Biden discussing with Republican colleagues on both that committee and Judiciary the notion of "trading" Bolton's confirmation for a vote on all if not the majority of President Bush's judicial nominees who are being blocked by Biden and other Dems. Depending on how negotiations played out, Bolton's nomination would either have died, or moved ahead after the dumping of at least three Bush judicial nominations.

"It sounds like it was the Senator's attempt to break the deadlock," says one of the Democratic staffers. "But nothing came of it, and that's a good thing...."

I never thought that idea, if it had been suggested, would go anywhere, either. But it's a gratifying vindication of my cynical instincts to see that it was forwarded, however briefly, into the dim light of the Beltway day.

***I have officially become a fan of Senator David Vitter (R-LA). Read Wes Vernon's account of how he took New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg to school on the issue of left-wing domestic terrorism:

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe of Oklahoma (one of the good guys in this real-life drama) may not have realized he was touching a raw nerve with his more liberal colleagues when he held a hearing on that subject May 18. But shortly after he gaveled the panel to order, he was confronted with an indignant and defensive firestorm.

Some liberals seem to be super-sensitive over evidence that there are people affiliated with "mainstream" organizations who are helping the violence-prone Environment Liberation Front (ELF) and/or Animal Liberation Front (ALF). When specific examples are cited, they want to change the subject.

In an explosive and contentious hearing, John Lewis, Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI's Counter-terrorism Division, said ecoterrorism – as represented by ELF and ALF – is "way out front" among domestic terrorists.

That assessment was questioned by liberal senator Frank Lautenberg. While going out of his way to employ the strongest possible words to condemn ecoterrorists or any violence for whatever cause, the New Jersey Democrat cited "hate crimes" and abortion clinic bombers as greater terrorist threats simply because of their numbers.

He even dragged in the fight over CSX running its freight trains with hazardous material through the city of Washington, D.C. That is a matter of some concern, and is a complicated issue with no winners and no losers.

In any event, it is irrelevant to the hearing. The railroad is no terrorist. In focusing on ELF and ALF, we're talking about fundamentally bad people. What part of "bad people" do we not understand here?

In fact, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, actually read the dictionary definition of "terrorism," for Senator Lautenberg's benefit. Vitter sought to delineate the difference between deliberate efforts to do harm, on the one hand, and (for example) the risk in a Hobson's choice of either transporting hazmat (chlorine) or leaving millions of Americans without water from their faucets because chlorine is necessary to purify drinking water.

The dictionary defines "terrorism" as "the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes," as Vitter explained.

Lautenberg shot back with a sarcastic "Thank you, Senator Vitter. I was not aware of that."

But the Louisianan wasn't through. He then went on to take his New Jersey colleague to task for – as we noted above – protesting too much. He asked why Lautenberg had deemed it necessary to defend such organizations as the Audubon Society when nobody at the hearing had accused them of anything.

At that point, Lautenberg turned to committee Chairman Inhofe, R-OK, and asked: "Mr. Chairman, am I a witness here? If I am, I'd be glad to take a seat at the witness table." Whereupon Inhofe gently suggested to Vitter that he direct his questions to the witnesses.

"Teacher, teacher, he's being mean to me!" Geez, what a whiner. One can only imagine Inhofe's bemusement at this pathetic display.

Or, rather, that most recent one, since when the Chairman played a three minute video at the start of the hearing "showing a convicted ecoterrorist/arsonist, Rodney Coronado, teaching kids how to light incendiary devices [and] accompanied by such rhetoric as 'We should destroy them [businesses the terrorists self-righteously determine to be injurious to the environment or abusive to animals] by any means necessary,' and 'their [the police] car should burn,'" Lautenberg first tried to shout it down, then, after Inhofe "gaveled him down," got up and started to walk out, only stopping up short when the video concluded. And then there was the part where Director Lewis tried to cite examples of ecoterrorism in Lautenberg's own state, and the senator rudely cut him off with the dismissive comment that "We already know all about that."

Arrogant jackoffs like Frank Lautenberg need to be humiliated. Repeatedly. Even if they learn nothing from the experience, it makes an excellent spectator sport. Just as Senator Vitter.