Herb Kohl Flees the Reality Based Community

Herb Kohl, D - Wisc justified his vote in favor of Roberts with the line "I will vote my hopes today and not my fears."

Just as he hoped we'd be greeted as liberators.

Just as he hoped we'd only use our new police powers to catch terrorists.

There are all sorts of reasons to vote for Roberts - some of them more defensible than others.

But this is just idiotic.  This is tantamount to taking candy from strangers.  Wasn't your job, in the hearings, to get answers substantive enough that you wouldn't have to vote based upon blind faith?  What were you DOING during those hearings if not pursuing tangible answers with which you could begin to triangulate Roberts' positions?

I've always been partisan in my voting, if not in my thinking.  Today I have decided that Kohl will not receive any vote from me in 2006.

  I have to vote based upon my fear that he is chronically derelict in his duty, not my hope that it's a temporary lapse.

Update/Addition As one of the first posters asks, am I also turning on Feingold? I accidentally buried my reply. The answer is, no. Three reasons:

1 I'm not ready to turn on him, because his record is so much stronger than Kohl's, over all. This is just one frustration with Feingold. For Kohl it's a nail in the coffin.

2 Feingold's rationale, as communicated to the press so far was "This was really tough, I think I did the right thing." It's not a justification so much as an admission that he did a lot of personal grappling with the issue. In Kohl's case, it sounds like he just threw his hands up in the air and has decided to hope for the best. There's a world of difference, there.

3 I watched the hearings, and there was a world of substantive difference in each of their lines of questioning.