Having been given a reason to take a glance at some of the more juvenile of pseudo-left blogs yesterday evening, they're in a bit of a swivet about the nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia. Well, Merrick Garland isn't someone I'd have liked to see appointed either, he's somewhat more conservative than someone I'd like to see on the court but there is one thing that is certain, he's the first nominee in, perhaps, decades who is to the left of the person he's replacing. There is no prospect that Barack Obama would have appointed someone as conservative as, or to the right of the partisan, peevish, whimsical fascist who Antonin Scalia was. So there's that in favor of the nomination.
And, from my point of view, the guy is a product of Harvard and would continue the Ivy League colonial occupation of our government. There is something that happens to most, though not all, of the people who graduate from those elite training grounds for the ruling class that is not good for a democracy, not good for the majority of people in the country. They get too used to feeling that they are part of the elite, part of those who rule by right, they get too used to schmoozing with other people who feel that way and they want, way, way too much to please and have the approval of other members of that elite. It is time to give people more remote from such elites the chance to make rulings. I would still like to get Hillary Clinton on record as promising to appoint people who attended and graduated from public universities after graduating from public schools, preferably those whose own children attended public schools. The elite prep-Ivy product control of that institution needs to be broken up.
However, the mewling and puking of rage among the play-lefties over this, their shaking their little fists at what they consider the most recent betrayal by Barack Obama is ridiculous. There is every reason for him to have believed that whoever he nominated would not actually ever sit on the Supreme Court. The Republicans, with the widespread support of their kept media, are changing the rules to make the first Black president's term end a year early. Something they would never do to a white man. It is just the latest in attempts to make Barack Obama a non-president on the basis of race, that has obviously been the tactic that Republicans have been using from the moment he won the nomination in 2008.
This was clearly a nomination made to embarrass the Republicans such as the oily, hypocritical Orrin Hatch who suggested that Garland was someone he thought should be on the court and those who made such statements, on the record.
I am not greatly enthusiastic for Merrick Garland's appointment to the Supreme Court but I will give him this, he agreed to serve that purpose with the full knowledge that the Republicans in the Senate would very likely vilify him in order to obstruct even holding hearings on his nomination. Garland isn't stupid enough to believe they would make this easy for him.
However, the really stupid thing about this is the reaction on the blogs and comment threads among the childish play-left who never let reality get in the way. The Republican-fascists in the Senate will be embarrassed by denying Merrick Garland a nomination process, they would feel no embarrassment in denying that to the dream candidates who we on the left could dream up.
Given what Obama is facing from the Republican over ANY nomination to the court, this is probably the smartest play he could make. As a gamble, in THIS game, not the game we imagine as ideal, it's not the worst gambit he could bet on. Either he gets the Republicans in the Senate to back down and he gets a nominee who will shift the court radically to the left, making the Republicans look weak and foolish or they reject Garland, a man a number of prominent Republicans have praised and makes them look like hypocrites who are politicizing the court. Which, of course, is what they've been doing for decades.
Politics, governing, those are real, they aren't a fantasy world that so many on the play-left insist other join them in pretending. I've been enormously critical of Barack Obama, especially his first two years which he wasted on trying to get the Republicans to like him. A lot of that was also the fault of the people he chose to manage his administration, I still grit my teeth when I remember Rahm Emanuel, David Axlerod and a host of others in Obama's inner circle who totally wasted the best hand a Democrat had been given since 1964. I think if I saw any of them I would feel like punching them in the nose. I'm still not someone who could be counted as an admirer of Barack Obama, I don't think I ever will be. But he's not stupid and, for all the disappointments, he's better than the alternative would have been. One thing he isn't is as massively unrealistic as the play-left is. On this one, he played it about as well as he could have.
There is one thing, if Garland gets on the court and does what his fellow Harvard product, Elena Kagan, has done, recuse herself at the drop of an implication, he should withdraw his nomination. At this point her doing that is just cowardly bull shit. The Republicans who openly flaunt their conflict of interest, as Scalia was when he died, never do that. Kagan wasn't taking emoluments when she was marginally involved in the issues she recused herself from, as Scalia, Thomas and other Republicans openly do even in recently judged and even active issues which might come up.
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