I think I've finally figured it out. I think I've finally gotten a peek inside their playbook - their thick, leather-bound playbook - and what I saw was quite scary:
We are in the middle of a multi-pronged parallel assault that would have made Von Clausewitz proud - something I'll explain below the fold.
In today's
Washington Post Dana Milbank covers a recent meeting of high-level wingnuts to discuss the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy.
Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment.
So, the notion that juveniles should not be subject to the death penalty is impeachable. Right. I got that. But the next bit was so over the top, that I felt like they'd started to tip their hand. First the quote, then an explanation of what I mean by "tip their hand."
Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy "should be the poster boy for impeachment" for citing international norms in his opinions. "If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well."
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
Once the ubercons start quoting Stalin, I start to get a little suspicious, especially when the full quote is, "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem."
And then it hit me: we shouldn't be surprised by any level of hyperbole on the part of these loons. We shouldn't even concern ourselves with what they say about judges, because that's not the point. It is simply, to put it in military terms, preparing the battlefield.
See, the current uproar over "activist" judges, the Schiavo debacle, the conferences like the one in Milbank's article - these are mere components in the overall plan. They exist to create support for the so-called Nuclear Option which has, at its apparent core, the debate over judicial nominations.
The real core of the Nuclear Option, however, is the belief that Republicans can destroy the Democratic party to the point that it will never return.
The end of the fillibuster means far more than the approval by the Senate of Bush's judicial nominees. The judicial nominees are merely the point of departure. What lies ahead is a virtual rubber stamp on anything Bush might want: his Social Security plan, another war, more tax breaks for the rich, prayer in schools, The Rapture, etc...
Because the question top Republican strategists were asking wasn't "How do we get W. those last ten nominees?" The real question that brought us the current brouhaha over judges was "How do we get rid of the fillibuster?"
Ergo the huge stink about 10 of 214 judges, ergo the need to heat up the wingnut base over judges, ergo the Schiavo memo and subsequent crusade, dreamed up by a conservative think tank veteran, ergo conservatives begin quoting Stalin because a Supreme Court judge didn't think juveniles should be executed, ergo every bit of unbelievably loony noise we've all seen drummed up about judges.
Because it ain't about judges at all, folks. Really, it ain't even about pulling the fillibuster out of the hands of the minority.
It's about the beginning of the conservative endgame as far as the war on Liberalism goes: Destroy your opponent's options and do it in a way that makes your opponent seem like he did it to himself. It's the conservative's Reichstag Fire.
So, whether we're fighting the Nuclear Option because we're worried about courts filled with right wing judges, or because we know our very survival as a party depends on it, we all know that the Nuclear Option must be defeated at all costs. The only question is, are we smart enough to stop it?