THIS MODERN WORLD

Every time you get your story straight, somebody comes along and screws up the narrative.

Coming up next: righties earnestly discuss why the Red Cross hates America.

A few posts below, Greg mentions the fact that Bush was the last person to know about the plane that violated White House airspace. We know now that it was a false alarm, but it really is extraordinary that at the moment the White House was being evacuated, as the First Lady was rushed to the bunker and Dick Cheney was hustled off, presumably to an undisclosed location, Bush was obliviously riding his bicycle. (One imagines him wearing a propeller beanie and riding the sort of old fashioned bike featured in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.)

My point is this: it has become fashionable, even among left-liberal types, to suggest that the President is actually very smart in his own way, and the crude, cartoonish stereotypes of him as a dolt and a dunderhead actually just play into his hands.

But you know what? In a post 9/11 world, when there is even the remotest possibility that we are looking at another terrorist attack, the fact that the President is not immediately informed of the situation — and is, in fact, the last person to learn about it — proves one thing: he really is that stupid. No one cares what he thinks.

It’s really true.

First, an email that came in the other day:

Hi. My name’s Scott — , I’m a U.S. citizen from Nashville, RED, RED, RED Tennessee (I voted for Kerry). I’m a Christian. I have no reason to believe that the Earth is 5,000 years old. I do not believe that Satan planted dinosaur bones (Gimme a break). I say this to remind everyone that not all Christians are gullible lunatics, and not all Christians are buying the war profiteers’ simple-minded rhetoric. I may be crazy, and I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it’s hard to screw up something as simple as “thou shalt not kill.” Remember, Dr. Martin Luther King was also a Christian. People on the left need to realize that they’re not at odds with scripture, though some of them have been fooled into thinking that they are.

I’m posting this for a couple of reasons. First, Scott is absolutely correct — it’s obviously a mistake to assume that all Christians are crazy fundamentalists. (Jack Hitt has been too busy with real deadlines to post anything here yet, but this is a topic about which he has much to say, so maybe when he gets some time he’ll toss in his two cents.) But like all coins, this one has two sides — it’s equally a mistake to therefore assume that the rise of the militant evangelicals is not something to be concerned about, or to let conservative pundits of the “No One Understands Real Americans Like I Do” school convince you that such concern is simply the byproduct of your elitist liberal bigotry. The current Harper’s Magazine has two good pieces on the topic — a look inside the nation’s most powerful megachurch by Jeff Sharlet, and a report from the National Religious Broadcaster’s convention by Chris Hedges (the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning). They’re not online, that I can tell — you’ll have to go buy the magazine. But there’s a passage at the end of the latter article that I’ve scanned in order to post here, because it’s an important counterweight to the aforementioned N.O.U.R.A.L.I.D.O. pundits.

…a few other thoughts about playing by the “old polite rules of democracy” while those in power dismantle our democratic state. That’s exactly what was happening in the runup to war, every time a Sensible Liberal said, gosh, you know, maybe Saddam really is a menace, maybe we have to give the President a fair hearing, maybe we have no choice but to invade, yadda yadda yadda. (There are some fairly well respected liberal bloggers that I can barely stand to read today as a result of this sort of nonsense.)

And it’s what was happening when I went to a speech Joe Liberman gave a month or so ago. When asked how he was going to vote on one or another of Bush’s more egregious nominees — I think it was Bolton, but I can’t find my notes, so I’m not 100% certain — anyway, he said he genuinely did not know, because he felt that he always had to give the President the benefit of the doubt.

All I can say is, we don’t have the luxury of such equivocation these days. The moderates and Sensible Liberals may be content to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but our time would be much better spent trying to figure out how to steer course away from the iceberg, if such is still possible.

Josh Marshall does a great job of explaining the severity of the Republican “constitutional” option :

Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.
. . .
For that to be true stands not only the simple logic of the constitution, but two hundred years of our constitutional history, on its head. You don’t even need to go into the fact that other judicial nominations have been filibustered, or that many others have been prevented from coming to a vote by invocation of various other senate rules, both formal and informal, or that almost countless numbers of presidential nominees of all kinds have simply never made it out of committee. Indeed, the whole senate committee system probably cannot withstand this novel and outlandish interpretation of the constitution, since one of its main functions is to review presidential appointees before passing them on to the full senate.

Quite simply, the senate is empowered by the constitution to enact its own rules.

You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries.

I’m not usually one for slippery slope arguments, but this certainly looks like it would pour a can of oil on our proverbial slope. Would this abrupt decision to declare the Senate rules unconstitutional undermine the entire committee system? That would pretty much grind the Senate to a halt. What would this mean in regards to everything else the Senate has accomplished over the last 200 years? What would this mean for the thousands of pieces of legislation that have been killed in committee over the last two centuries? Is there anything in this precedent that would compell the Senate to reconsider bills that had previously been discarded under the “unconstitutional” rules? Are these few judges really worth opening up this can of worms for?

Rest in peace, Frank.