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Jewish World Review Nov. 2, 2005 / 30 Tishrei, 5766 Trading political know-how with extremism By Kathryn Lopez
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Minutes after Harriet Miers' withdrawal as the nominee for
Associate Justice to the Supreme Court was publicly announced,
conservatives who opposed the nomination based on principle (count
me among them) were being tagged as "extremists" by the political
right and left.
After a few weeks of right-on-right debates, there was some comfort
to be taken in the partisan planets being placed back onto their
axes. At least the political enemies were clear again, right? NARAL
Pro-Choice America ominously warned of the "right wing's real
agenda," which roughly translates to this: conservatives want a
nominee who won't legislate from the bench or protect a right they
believe judges wrote into the Constitution in the first place (Which
— sorry, NARAL sisters — seems like a fair political position to
me, one that the current president basically ran and won on).
Familiar faces, like Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D-Mass.), were out
in force wearing their outrage masks. Kennedy said that "extreme
factions of the president's own political party" were the only
voices allowed to be heard on the Miers' pick. Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid threatened the president with fear of the
right-wing reaper (those allies who couldn't get behind his Miers'
pick), who would dash the president's future Supreme plans.
But the overheated rhetoric stemming from the Miers' nomination was
circulating all around the political world. This was not exclusively
a left-wing sport. In the early days of the doomed nomination,
surrogates for the president on the right were calling conservative
critics "sexist" and "elitist." Capitol Hill staff reported one
White House aide patronizingly assuring them that Miers was "no
slap-ass," as if critics assumed a woman would be a ditz just by
virtue of being a woman. There were principled reasons to oppose the
nomination. Many conservatives looked at the absence of a clear
record on Miers' judicial philosophy and saw the pick as too much of
a gamble, especially with a candidate who didn't seem to be Supreme
Court material in the first place. Once Miers graciously withdrew
her nomination, some of her campaigners claimed that she did, in
fact, have the votes in the Senate. But Senate Majority Leader (and
presidential hopeful) Bill Frist, who went to the White House and
effectively ended the nomination, knew otherwise.
I gleaned this from my own readers' reactions. Readers on the right
were far from monolithic on the Miers' nomination. The critical
e-mails I would usually get from angry conservative readers suddenly
echoed the ones I regularly get from liberal readers (like the many
furious e-mails doused in expletives I received for my mild defense
of the president's post-Katrina performance). In the wake of the
failed Miers' nomination, readers sounded off with "idiot,"
"pathetic," and even blamed me for "destroying the Bush presidency."
This mentality is hysterical and "unhinged" politics. Michelle
Malkin addresses this in her new book "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals
Gone Wild" (Regnery). Malkin focuses on "Liberals who've lost their
grip on sanity and reality." She writes,"From the grass roots to
the top suits, Democrats have abandoned arguments in favor of ad
hominem attacks and conspiracy theories."
Elections are won. Supreme Court nominations fail. We move on. But
why increasingly further away from civility, too? If you've got
good, substantive ideas, why bury them in invective? If you don't,
and insanity and anger is all you have to fall back on, you might
want to reevaluate what you're standing for in the first place.
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