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You are here: Home / Open Threads / The Eternal Sunshine of the Clueless Mind

The Eternal Sunshine of the Clueless Mind

by John Cole|  July 6, 20053:46 pm| 9 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Sometimes you just have to laugh at the right wing of my party. President Bush asks the mkindly to pipe down about Supreme Court nominees, because, quite frankly, they are looking like a bunch of salivating extremists, and this is the response:

“The only ones who could make somebody sound extreme,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group, “are some of the president’s allies talking in an inappropriate way and themselves sounding extreme, which then gets tagged to the nominees.”

The wingnuts, of course, got the message and extended a middle finger to the President:

Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a Christian conservative candidate for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, said, “A lot of people feel that the administration shouldn’t be reluctant to talk about the values we hope the nominee will embrace.”

“If all my side does is talk about process – ‘we want a fair hearing, etc.’ – while Ted Kennedy is talking about ‘we are not going to let somebody on the court who is going to take away the rights of individuals,’ as silly as I think that is, it will affect the way people think about the battle,” Mr. Bauer said.

Tom Minnery, director of public policy for Focus on the Family, an evangelical group and broadcaster based in Colorado Springs, blamed leftist advocates for the “decibel level” of judicial confirmation debates and said his group planned to continue to address mainly social and cultural issues “to get our constituents to understand how important this battle is.”

Officials of several Christian conservative groups, who did not want to be identified because of what they said was pressure by the White House, said they were continuing to urge the president not to nominate Mr. Gonzales.

Tuesday evening, Focus on the Family transmitted an e-mail message to supporters with the title, “Bush Defends Gonzales. Some conservatives wonder if attorney general is right for Supreme Court.”

Other groups circulated a statement from a prominent opponent of abortion rights, C. J. Willkie, describing what he said were private statements from Mr. Gonzales on the subject in an effort to discredit him further with social conservatives.

“Go to hell, President Bush- we got you elected,” seems to be the consensus. And don’t forget this rundown of what they want.

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9Comments

  1. 1.

    KC

    July 6, 2005 at 4:18 pm

    You know, I do have to say that I can understand the fundamentalists’ outrage at the President and the Republican leadership. Quite frankly, they’ve been good soldiers, supporting Republican candidates through thick and thin. They expect some return for their support and now here’s their chance to get it.

    For the President to turn his back on them after all these years would be pretty offensive. They’re tired of politics, they’re tired of having to dawn moderate masks to get Republicans elected, they’re ready to throw their game faces on. They want Christianity enshrined in law, education, and our daily lives. If the President doesn’t heed their call, they’re going to be pissed and they’re letting him know it now.

    Lets face it, at some point the President and the GOP leadership is going to have to quit talking the talk and start walking the walk. The partial birth abortion ban was really just a sop, fundamentalists want more. I think they’re justified in asking for it too given their hard work.

  2. 2.

    demimondian

    July 6, 2005 at 4:37 pm

    You know, KC, I agree with you. The Right WingNuts deserve more credit for their past efforts. I mean, think about it. Without their votes, the votes of the other 47% of the American electorate who voted for W wouldn’t have mattered. The minority of American who support the Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t have mattered. And Tom Delay wouldn’t have gotten all those free meals from Jack Abramoff.

    And, you know what? I’ve figured out what the right way to give them what they deserve is. The president should nominate a fetus to the supreme court.

    Now, since fetuses can’t talk, it’s clear that he’ll have to nominate a fetus-vessel to the court to interpret on its — err, I mean, his — behalf. The only thing is that the fetus vessel would have to be a real fetus vessel. None of these fake vessels like Ginsberg or O’Connor, but someone who would dedicate her life to being a real Vestal vessal, dedicated to carrying fetuses forever, whatever the cost to her life or health.

  3. 3.

    KC

    July 6, 2005 at 4:46 pm

    Hah! That was pretty funny, demimondian. That said, you have to admit that the WH was pretty candid about getting more evangelicals to vote on their behalf in this election. I recognize a lot of other people voted for Bush too, but the GOP was pretty happy to credit evangelicals for their gains and with Bush’s election.

  4. 4.

    demimondian

    July 6, 2005 at 7:25 pm

    Thank you, thank you. Try the veal; it’s very good. And tip your servers.

    I don’t disagree that the GOP was pretty happy to credit evangelicals after last November, but I’m far from convinced that the party members were very sincere, and, if they were, to what extent they remain so. Schiavo was a catastrophe for the WingNuts, and the “JustUs Sunday” debacle merely cemented their reputation as blowhards who talk a big story, but can’t deliver on their pitch.
    There’s no label in politics that’s worse than that.

    To give you a sense of context, the death knell of the traditional unions was signed on November 6th, 1980, when the UAW membership went for Reagan over Carter. If the bosses couldn’t deliver, then they were impotent as political kingmakers. Palm Sunday, 2005, will go down as the day that broke the back of religious conservatism.

  5. 5.

    Al Maviva

    July 6, 2005 at 8:08 pm

    Laugh now, John. Mark my words, you will gnash your teeth at Justice Gonzales. He may be Bush’s friend, but he’s a politician, not a lawyer, and the politicians all turn out the same way when they get on the Court. They love power too much.

    Legal conservatives – Federalist Society types, including me – want a constitutional textualist. That means somebody who follows the text of the law. A technician. A scholarly, erudite lawyer, of good character. Breyer is a good example of a liberal textualist. So was the late Judge Higginbotham. Scalia is a fair example of a conservative textualist. So is Kozinski.

    Legal conservatives dislike Gonzales because he isn’t a scholarly textualist, he’s a “pragmatic” difference splitter, meaning he has a gut feeling about what the result ought to be, and will likely invent rights and reasons to get there. The ultimate result of this is a jurisprudence of babble that is of little value to practitioners. Justice Kennedy’s 14th Amendment jurisprudence and Justice O’Connor’s botched 1st Amendment jurisprudence are two good examples of where results oriented judges get you.

    Social conservative activists dislike Gonzales because he is liberal in inclination, and is likely to be less of a swing voter, and more of a steady liberal vote, than any other likely nominees. They would settle for a constitutional textualist because the textualist would defer to Congress on questions within Congress’ power, and the social conservatives are comfortable knowing they can pick up the odd win here or there in Congress.

    Frankly, I’m more pissed about this Gonzales thing than any straight up social conservative that I know. The social conservatives tend to be comfortable with the notion of activist judges, because they think they may eventually get a few of their team onto the court. I’m not comfortable with activist judges because willy-nilly jurisprudence is just another name for oligarchy, and once my side does it, the other side will do it too, except worse.

    Both legal conservatives (many of whom are politically libertarian or sometimes even politically liberal) and social conservatives (some of whom are also legal conservatives) oppose Gonzales because he will most likely turn the Court further to the left. If you really think that a Court this Court needs to turn left – a court that (1) effectively outlawed the death penalty, (2) found a constitutional right to sodomy, (3) upheld partial birth abortion; and (4) believes the power of the state to regulate *every* human activity as commercial intercourse, save actual intercourse – if you believe this court needs to turn left, well, more power to you. But please, drop the “conservative contrarian” label and just call yourself flat out liberal.

  6. 6.

    John Cole

    July 6, 2005 at 8:20 pm

    Al- I have written that i think Gonzalez is a statist, and I don’t want a leftward lurch to the court.

    The point here is that Bush is asking people to pipe down and let him make his pick, and then have people vote on it. All this nonsense right now is premature.

  7. 7.

    AlanDownunder

    July 7, 2005 at 2:29 am

    I recall Bush saying before the election that he want a strict constructionists. So why do the fundies who want an activist think they are being betrayed? I guess that’s not really a rhetorical question – they wouldn’t know what a constructionist was but Bush is “born again” so constructionists had to be kosher

    Oh and ALMaviva – Scalia is no textualist. No textualist could invent a “people of the book” v “others” religious distinction. He plays at being a textualist by resort to originalism in his textual interpretation, but his originalism derives from an imaginary history that accords more with his inclinations than with historical fact.

  8. 8.

    Jim Allen

    July 7, 2005 at 8:08 am

    Re: “If all my side does is talk about process – ‘we want a fair hearing, etc.’ – while Ted Kennedy is talking about ‘we are not going to let somebody on the court who is going to take away the rights of individuals,’ as silly as I think that is, it will affect the way people think about the battle,” Mr. Bauer said.

    Am I right in taking this to mean that Bauer wants to put someone on the court who will take away the rights of individuals?

  9. 9.

    Sojourner

    July 7, 2005 at 8:31 am

    It would be nice if the Dems directly addressed all the nonsense about judicial activism. Yesterday’s NYT article demonstrates the hypocrisy of the conservative right on this issue. Nominees such as Janice Rogers Brown emphasize Bush’s activist aspirations to roll back the protections most Americans want.

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