Perhaps you're right about this. But therein lies my breaking point. President Reagan swung for the fences with Robert Bork and unfortunately the ball was snagged from leaving the ball park.
In 1987, there was no internet, no talk radio, no real conservative grass roots movement for Reagan to rely on to fight back. As this National Review article from 1987 points out, the left in 1987 was already well armed for a fight: http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200510050806.asp
Where we stand in 2005, there's a calvary of support ready to go to battle for Luttig, Brown, Owen or McConnell. This only adds (I think) to the dismay felt by myself and I assume others...
I totally agree. The pro Bush folks keep hammering on us saying that we have no choice and could never win that fight.
Maybe. (Of course if we had a Senate Majority Leader we could be a bit more confident...but that again goes back to Frist being teh White House's man). But...being true is sometimes better than winning. So we put up Luttig and lose. I think that's a fight we could be proud of and we can know that the legacy of losing that fight is further energizing to us down the road...geez...it's been 20 years since Bork and we are still fired up about that!!!
We shouldn't forget that Reagan attempted something great with a minority in the Senate.
Another point has been brewing with me today. There have been several books over the last two or 3 years which talk about "trust" and "credibility" as a character trait a CEO must have. GWB is supposed to be the consummate CEO, Harvard MBA and all that. Maybe he's not that much of a genius after all, b/c he or someone has failed to see that their abandonment of the conservative positions domestically has left him looking very, very untrustworthy, to put it politely. And it appears that he didn't know that that would spill over into this selection.
In that regard, this whole mess demonstrates a huge miscalculation and a big failure of leadership - or, rather, the logical result of an ongoing failure. Of course if the rocket scientists in the White House had understood this, they could have gone for a fight and got back a lot of that value. The timing would have been perfect.
Imagine...nominate JRB only a few weeks after a speech on Katrina that will live in infamy. ("institutional racism" and all that). Now THAT would have been brilliant.
And talk about uniting the conservative movement and leading them into battle.....that would have been fun, and would have helped us in 2006.