Schumer Regrets Not Filibustering Alito
Well, I appreciate your candor on this Chuck. I really do. It's difficult to admit your screw-ups, and I admire people who can do so.
But I really, really wish you'd had this revelation earlier.
That'll teach you to trust the Bushies.
I wonder whether we'll see the following headline in three or four years:
Pelosi Regrets Not Impeaching Bush
?
Well, I appreciate your candor on this Chuck. I really do. It's difficult to admit your screw-ups, and I admire people who can do so.
But I really, really wish you'd had this revelation earlier.
That'll teach you to trust the Bushies.
I wonder whether we'll see the following headline in three or four years:
Pelosi Regrets Not Impeaching Bush
?
posted by Winston Smith at
10:03 AM
13 Comments:
Of course, what goes around comes around.
Well, since the Republican Congress blocked an indefensible number of Clinton judicial appointees...and now the Dems are TALKING about blocking the most EXTREME of Bush's appointees...I guess you could say that what went around has SORT of come around...
But not in a full-fledged way, really...
But we can always hope...
A reading of the link shows it talking about the future, not the past.
Labeling people "extreme" is of course extreme in itself. Alito is no more extreme in his way than Justice Ginsberg is in hers.
Labeling people extreme..is...extreme...in itself..
So you're saying any time anyone says someone else is extreme, that person is really just being..extremely..what? Clearly, WS was indicating that Alito is the most extreme in his leanings to partisanship on the republican side. What type of extreme are you talking about?
Are you saying something like "Any time someone labels someone else as extreme, that person is wrong"?
I don't get what kind of extremeness is required to say someone is extremely partisan.
Let me amend that to say calling most everyone on the other side extreme is extreme. I think Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are extreme and we should save our nukes for such folks.
Sam Alito sits pretty much in the mainstream of the right (unless there's some smoking gun I'm not aware of). Ergo, even the mainstream of the right is "extreme" by this reasoning.
Now, Justice Ginsberg sits, in my view, in the mainstream of the left. If we apply Shumer's standards, the GOP should have filibustered her.
Perhaps, but as the link (which I'm sure you read) points out, what goes around comes around. Maybe we should filibuster all potential replacements forever and ever until they all die off and the Supreme Court is no more. That would be interesting.
But the "mainstream of the right" IS extreme, it's just that the right wing corporate media have spent the past thirty years telling the US population that the right-side twenty yard line is actually the fifty:
http://mediamatters.org/progmaj/report
Cue ad hominem argument by Tom Van Dyke against source, better known by its stage name "Reality has a liberal bias".
I'll leave the ad homs to Glenn Greenwald. And you.
You write:
But the "mainstream of the right" IS extreme...
I can't argue with that, since you claim poseession of the terms of argument, and apparently so does Chuck Shumer.
So let's acknowledge that Shumer's talking about the entire other side and not just its outliers, and move on, as they say.
I think it's extreme to claim that you have to be extreme to label someone extreme. Extremely.
But I'm just projecting.
No, you have to be extreme to label everyone on the other side of the issues extreme. "Extreme" is a pejorative and a delegitimizer.
Its misuse in this sense means that one is unable to deal with the proposition that conscientious disagreement with one's own position is possible.
Not pretty.
You fail to address the substantive point that the Republicans already undertook to block a indefensible number of Clinton's judicial appointees.
So it isn't even true that what goes around comes around. The Republicans acted--as is so often the case--in an inexcusably partisan way. When it's suggested that the Dems should react with about 1/100th of the partisanship in response, GOP loyalists like you, Tom, cry 'foul'.
I'm fairly sick of it, frankly.
Not to mention not engaging the argument, buttressed by hard evidence, that the Democratic positions, and the past few Democratic platforms, are FAR closer to the *mainstream*, issue by issue.
But that's just "ad hom", or something.
I'm not crying foul atall atall. That's for whiners, and for politicians (and Ds and Rs have alternated roles with astonishing regularity). This is me here, WS: I love obstructionism, remember. When the cost in public opinion gets too high, one side gives in. It's a beautiful system.
The GOP blocked lots of Clinton appointees. The Democrats have been getting 'em back. So be it, all's fair, etc.
(1/100th? Sure, if you say so, altho I question whether the metrics would stand up.)
No, my point is that Alito's no farther right than Ginsburg is left. We, and by that I mean Chuck Shumer of course, use "extreme" too loosely, I think, and by doing so, point the finger back onto ourselves.
I see that Diane Feinstein, notorious radical centrist, was the deciding committee vote today to let a Bush appointee slip through to a full vote in the Senate, where it's predicted he'll be confirmed. Interesting. Either she's voting her conscience because there's nothing wrong with the nominee, or she's saving her party from itself. I'm good either way.
"No, my point is that Alito's no farther right than Ginsburg is left."
Demonstrably proven false, by poll after poll after poll.
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