What? You Expected A Brennan, A Douglas?

Via Avedon:

I am a killjoy.

I suppose I'm expected to ready myself for a fight to defend Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee against an onslaught of GOP hissy-fit in which she is falsely cast as some kind of a screaming (literally) liberal rather than a mostly-conservative (though not completely insane) jurist who prefers the powerful to The People but just doesn't happen to have a bug up her ass about abortion.

She is, of course, just what we don't need - another "liberal" whose credentials as such rest entirely on the fact of not being a fire-and-brimstone anti-abortion gay-hating loony.

Because that's what it takes these days - not actual liberal commitment to personal freedom, nor any resistance to the idea that rich, powerful people should run everything at the expense of the rest of us, or even a quaint affection for the idea that an honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay.

But, friends, the GOP hissy-fit is just convenient cover for the sell-out Dem leadership sliding yet another corporate conservative in with the Supremes without most people waking up to the fact that that's what they're doing. I mean, how can we complain when the Dems valiantly confirm Obama's nominee despite the fact that, as conservatives keep pointing out, she is a flaming liberal?

We should sit back and pat ourselves on the back for our valiant resistance to all that GOP hype about how she's "too" liberal. God forbid anyone should point out that she is actually to the right of more than two-thirds of Americans. (Ah, but somebody seems to like her.)

The Dems don't fight back against the fake right-wing outrage because it serves their purposes. They don't care that the right-wing are liars and they don't even mind most of the lies. They don't like being personally targeted by the right (because their friends can be bloody dangerous), but the lies actually serve their purposes.

You never hear them complain, for example, that right-wingers consistently lie about what the President's job is, because they don't particularly want anyone to do the President's actual job ('protecting the Constitution,' which could get ugly in the age of predatory capitalism. W.).

In fact, an overwhelming amount of the current public debate is about pretending that the President's real job does not exist - his real job, it is now averred, is to be "the Commander-in-Chief", and the discussion is about how he can do that job much better if he can just, y'know, ignore that Constitution thing. It must be true, because even Obama seems to agree, and I remember hearing all about how he is a Constitutional scholar throughout the campaign.

No wonder Kristol is always smiling. Oh, we've destroyed the conservative movement. The country is with us. No one likes the Republicans anymore. And yet even my favorite outraged lefty blogospheric voices are right where he wants them - defending a conservative president's choices as he destroys liberal America once and for all.

Lovely work. Mme. touches ALL my buttons: the "protect-the- country" myth, "Commander-in Chief" myth, the "too-liberal" myth, etc. I'd only disagree with one assertion: that we've "destroyed the conservative movement." That's not true. They've been driven underground, but like cockroaches (of which there seem to be an excessive number in the house this spring), they never REALLY go away.