Conservatives "win" best when uncertainty shrouds a very significant event. For example, when they make their victories appear as if like they had won nothing at all.
How many of us, in the days after the 2000 election, realized how important counting those few thousand chads would be? Most of us woke up the morning after election day and thought "it's a wash". "It's a victory for no one. It's a total tie." That's certainly how the media treated it. It didn't really sink in that whoever won the post-election count battle would significantly change the direction of the country for the next four, probably eight years. We thought both candidates were basically the same. So we didn't fight. We accepted it, when Gore conceded, we had no idea of the magnitude of the event that had just passed. Bush was a "nothing". We knew "nothing" about him. Neither did the American people.
Nothingness is Invincible. You cannot criticize Nothingness. You cannot defend against Nothingness. Nothingness is All-Powerful. Especially when behind
what appears to be Nothing is Something, Something very significant.
Everything, everything in the past five years, goes back to those weeks of November 2000. Bush and the Republicans managed to pull off the biggest political win in decades making it look as if nothing had changed. By hiding the magnitude of their victory, however illegitimate it might have been, with the aid of the mainstream media, the GOP managed to snuff out any opposition before it even got started. After all, in 2000, when it mattered, there was Nothing to oppose.
When the O'Connor replacement nomination came around, the same strategy was used again, in a different way. If there is one bright spot in his second term for Bush, amidst a heap of failure and breakdown, it is how he has handled the courts. Here again, the strategy of uncertainty, of creating "Nothingness" to hide substance, came into play.
By nominating someone who is clearly very conservative yet who has virtually no record, Bush essentially nominated 'nobody'. Americans didn't know what to think of him because there was 'Nothing' to think. As in 2000, because there was virtually no record, there was 'Nothing' to oppose.
Yet you have a guy who is going to be on the nation's highest court for probably 30 years or more. And because we have no idea what kind of justice Roberts will be, this means he can be just about any kind of justice he (or those who have inside knowledge of him) want.
One of the most basic tenets of war, from the days of Sun Tzu: 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.'
In the upcoming fight over the Rehnquist replacement, I have only one piece of advice for those on our side:
Knowing what kind of judge Bush has nominated is just as important if not more so than the views of the judge him/herself.
If the justice Bush nominates is ultra conservative and the Senate confirms him, at least we have no regrets. We had nothing to lose anyway; we couldn't possibly have won.
If a true centrist is nominated, that's the best we could have done. Again, no regrets.
The only way Bush can truly win is by nominating an extreme conservative and have nobody KNOW about it.
If Bush nominates another judge with 'no' record, we need to come out and make the point I am making in this diary: it is a terrible idea to nominate a judge who is totally unknown. The Supreme Court is just so important that letting through people about whom nothing is known is just unacceptable. The Supreme Court through its decisions will effect the lives of every American in very real ways, and a justice will influence that for 30 years or more.
An employer wouldn't hire someone he knows nothing about in hiring an employee, a college admissions committee wouldn't do it with an application. The Senate sure as hell shouldn't do it with the Supreme Court.
Don't let Bush pull another Roberts.