SCOTUS

So Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring, paving way for the President to nominate someone who's idea of the perfect social order is Alabama, circa 1950. The Senate will then descend into the chaos (remember that judicial compromise? - out the window). Democrats will try to block the nomination by any means necessary. Frist will scream "obstruction" (how dare the opposition party disagree with the majority!) and threaten to go nuclear. In the end, Bush will likely win and get his social ultra-conservative. Girls in Mississippi will have to start driving to Illinois for their abortions.

But amid all of this doomsaying, I think that we liberals ought to focus on some very important. What's that, you ask? Blame. In other words, who's fault is this mess? Oh, I'm sure there are lots of candidates - Tom Daschle and John Kerry, for being lousy leaders; James Dobson and Ralph Reed, for being such social neanderthals; President Bush, for tricking us all into believing in 2000 that he was a moderate.

But the real blame in my book has to go to Ralph Nader. Remember? The asshole who cost Al Gore the election? Yeah, without him, Gore would be President, and we could look forward to a nice moderate liberal to replace O'Connor, a nice moderate conservative.

Oh, you might say, Nader's hardly the real culprit here, and besides you're just kicking a guy who's already down. To which I answer, maybe and sure, but so what?, respectively. Progressives decided in 2000 that Clinton and Gore were some sort of crazed arch-conservatives in disguise, rather than the best liberal leaders since JFK. So they deliberately torpedoed Gore in order to get Bush in 2000, and then hopefully a "real" progressive in 2004. But it all failed miserably.

So now we just have to sit and wait for Bush to nominate his ultra and wait for the fireworks to begin.