Mr. President, they must think you're head of programming at CBS. Some people are telling you to name a Hispanic as your first Supreme Court nominee. Others say, Pick a woman. Harry Reid says, Pick someone who's not too controversial. Arlen Specter says, Look outside the judiciary for a fresh face.
See, it's hip and contemporary, because we're a doofy unread TV culture, so we need trendy metaphors to do our thinkin' for us. Thinkin' is hard work, not unlike brush-clearin'. Mister Preznit, Mister Preznit! Could you wear that nifty flight suit and codpiece so we can all swoon again? And can't we jazz up the SCOTUS nomination process? Arlen Specter is such a doody-head, what does he know?
Maybe we could make a summer-replacement reality show out of it, and everybody likes the dancin' now (except John Ashcroft). You could call it Dancin' With The Supremes. I don't know, Mister Preznit, I'm just a little pastel princess spitballing in front of millions of people.
Ah, we mock Bobo because we love. We love to mock Bobo, that is.
The serious (and obvious) riposte to Bobo's nonsensical premise is that it is Bush's (and, in turn, Bobo's) own party which is politicizing the nomination process. Failing a digital photo of Abu Gonzales cornholing a prisoner with a glow-stick (and maybe not even then), Latino interest groups apparently just want one of "theirs" moved up the ranks, no matter how rotten. Strangely, I seem to recall that one of the pillars of conservative "thought" was the total rejection of such reprehensible identity politics.
Never mind. The steno pool can't be bothered to point out the obvious; they'd rather create a briar-patch diversion in which the God Squad is pre-emptively borking Gonzales for possibly being too heterodox on abortion. You know, the law. Again, the steno pool may want to get involved on this one and publicly ask why, 35 years later, we're arguing over settled law, why almost all the groups that currently practice violent or forceful public dissent are hardcore right-wingers, usually revolving around abortion.
At any rate, perhaps Bobo might want to explain, in his inimitable breezy-hemorrhoid parlance, exactly why the fuck Cooter is consulting with traitor Jerry Falwell, whose name will always and forever be mud in the house of Heywood for the bullshit he and Pat Robertson spouted about the citizens of this country after 9/11.
"Someone from the White House called me yesterday, asking for any input I might have," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and chancellor of Liberty University in Virginia.
Mr. Falwell said he declined to offer advice, telling the White House staff member that, because of Mr. Bush's track record appointing conservative judges, "I am willing to sit back and trust him and pray for him."
There ya go, and that's what Bobo, as always, fails to apprehend. The poll numbers are in free-fall, the Rove scandal is only going to get bigger, and envelop the rest of the Republican tool box (especially Scooter Libby and Batshit Bolton), and Bush has pissed away his political capital on his little Social Security scam. And yet he'll always insist on dancing with them that brung him. This should not be a surprise, even to Bobo.
So I call bullshit. Bobo's premise is flawed, if not outright dishonest. If he doesn't know goddamned well already that a SCOTUS nomination is nothing but political currency to this gang, then he's even more dull and incompetent than we'd assumed.
Which would be sort of like finding out that Bush is even stupider than he seems. I guess anything's possible, but fucking how?
Look, for example, at how Michael McConnell, who is often mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, has already influenced American life through sheer force of intellect. First as a professor and now as a judge, McConnell has outargued those who would wall off religion from public life. He's a case study of the sort of forceful advocate of ideas you have a chance to leave the country as your legacy.
McConnell (whom I have never met) is an honest, judicious scholar. When writing about church and state matters, he begins with the frank admission that religion is a problem in a democracy. Religious people feel a loyalty to God and to the state, and sometimes those loyalties conflict.
So he understands why people from Rousseau and Jefferson on down have believed there should be a wall of separation between church and state.
I couldn't give two shits about the supposed conflicting loyalties of religious people. Really, it's fucking irrelevant to the matter at hand. The argument has always been whether they (and by "they", let's face it, we mean evangelical Christians) have the legal right to rub everyone else's noses in their personal beliefs, if they should be able to inject their myths into the mechanisms and institutions that all of us rely on to maintain and innovate the well-being of this nation.
Because if they have that right, then so does every other recognized religion. Do we all have the time and need for this flailing show of ecumenicism, or can we just run the fucking country like a business and mean it for once?
Is it so much to ask that everyone -- Christian, Jew, Muslim, Wiccan, whatever -- just keep it to themselves and leave everyone else alone? Of course it is. The whole point of this is to keep a culture war on the front burner, to motivate the base. Hillary and her lesbo friends want to take your Bibles away and have donut-bumping orgies on a big pile of them before setting them on fire and then pissing on them! Booga booga!
Contrary to the notions of the religious activists, nobody gives a shit about nativity scenes in the town square. Sure, there's always the occasional troublemaker, but there are many more instances of activist school boards across the country insisting on dumping their brand of claptrap on school kids by calling it science. It's not a fine distinction between the two, it's a difference on an order of magnitude.
So all these solemn pronunciamentos about the putative Judeo-Christian soul of this nation are really just cheap sophistry, a means for one side to collectively shove the other side. Naturally, the other side pushes back. C'mon chump, you want some o' this?
The problem with the Separationist view, he has argued in essays and briefs, is that it's not practical. As government grows and becomes more involved in health, charity, education and culture issues, it begins pushing religion out of those spheres. The Separationist doctrine leads inevitably to discrimination against religion. The state ends up punishing people who are exercising a constitutional right.
In one case, a public high school allowed students to write papers about reincarnation, but a student who wrote on "The Life of Jesus Christ" was given a zero by her teacher. The courts sided with the teacher. In another case, a physiology professor at a public university was forbidden from delivering an optional after-class lecture at the university entitled "Evidences of God in Human Physiology," even though other professors were free to profess any secular viewpoints they chose. Around the country, Marxists could meet in public buildings, but Bible study was impermissible.
When in doubt on this church-state thing, always drop a couple anecdotes. Bobo goes from 0 to 60 in just one paragraph, from a vague case of unfairness in high school to Marxism trumping Bible study.
If one were to take this hysterical nonsense seriously, one might actually think that Christians were being persecuted across the USA, instead of the reality of politicians cynically invoking God at every opportunity, because they pretty much have to. The United States is the only industrialized nation where more people believe in creation mythos than in empirical science and evolution, and where people regularly poll as expecting their political candidates to profess a belief in God. No professed atheist could get elected to any high office in this land. Many, if not most, public political, social and sporting events begin or end with some sort of explicit benediction or invocation to the Christian sky god. Everyone knows that presidential speeches are expected to end with "God bless America", as well as be peppered with references to the "Almighty" or the "Creator". Were it miraculously not to happen, the media coverage would rival that of a hurricane flipping over a dumpster in Boca Raton.
Even a Bobo might detect some sort of pattern here.
Look, I don't know enough about McConnell in particular to say that he's a good judge or a bad judge. And nothing in Bobo's column leads me to believe he would be some sort of Roy Moore wingnut. But Bobo's methodology is flawed and corrupted to its very core. He takes a limp "even-handed" pose on a contentious issue as an attempt to demonstrate the solomonic wisdom of one candidate, in the face of the social and political reality of American governmental culture.
At least he gets points for not going the Abu Gonzales route, but that's about it.
Yet presidents often make their Supreme Court picks on the most trivial bases: because so-and-so is a loyalist or a friend, because so-and-so has some politically convenient trait or ties to some temporarily attractive constituency. By thinking too politically, presidents end up reducing their own influence on history.
And again, we return to our original point -- nepotism is what these people do. They do not pick someone who isn't one of them; they have no use for someone who can't function as political capital with one of their ideological bases. Bush may very well be the most loyalist person in the history of American government -- he refuses even to elaborate or qualify any of his previous publicly recorded statements about Karl Rove, or what Bush would do with someone caught leaking politically sensitive information as payback. He can't even bring himself to affirm or disavow what we all already know.
This ought to be an indication that Bush is not a Serious Thinker, but a brazenly partisan hack. And all Bobo can do is genuflect and distract, like a good court fool should. Except court fools don't usually have a Deke symbol branded on their asses. Ah, such is the price for entry into the inner circle.
This is what pisses me off about Bobo, in the end -- not only has he chosen to align himself with the virulent, corrupt strain of Mayberry Machiavellianism that is intent on destroying everything that makes this country great, he soft-pedals it all as if he's working on a Desperate Housewives script on spec.
It is this breezy insight-free insouciance, in the face of very serious events and issues, that permeates every one of Bobo's little mash notes, and ultimately renders them all worthless. He may as well carve his and Dear leader's initals into every tree, for what his Bushie scrip will buy him these days.
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