Informed Speculation

You know the old saying: even a stopped watch is right twice a day. Well, Eleanor Clift is more like a broken record, but she gets one right when she says the Democrats should not filibuster Alito:

Democrats shouldn’t filibuster Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court unless he really bungles the hearings. The votes aren’t there, and moderates don’t have the stomach for an all-out war over spousal notification. By a margin of nearly 3-to-1 according to a Pew Research Center poll, the public sides with the position Alito took in 1991 when he upheld as constitutional a provision in a Pennsylvania law that required women to notify their husbands before obtaining an abortion.

However, her reasoning is the typical shrill hysterics we’ve come to expect from Clift:

Rather than risk the filibuster in an unwinnable fight over Alito, Democrats should save it for when and if that awful day arrives when the most liberal member of the court, John Paul Stevens, 85, steps down while Bush is still president.

Bush’s lasting domestic legacy will be a Supreme Court radically restructured to the right, and Alito likely will be confirmed just like John Roberts. That’s why Democrats shouldn’t get sidetracked. There are better battles to be fought. This week was a turning point when Democratic leader Harry Reid plunged the Senate into closed session and shamed the Republicans into speeding up a report on how the administration used prewar intelligence to boost its case for invading Iraq.

Oh, that awful, horrid day! But thank god for Dirty Harry, who has saved us from our awful lying Senators and Presidents who sent us to war because they believed the WMD intelligence: folks like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton…

Oh, but Clift is just getting warmed up:

Democrats feel emboldened, and they’re dropping the euphemisms. They’re saying straight out that the president and his administration lied and manufactured evidence to take the country to war. The logical extension of such an explosive charge would be impeachment, says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, though Wittman doesn’t personally advocate this strategy. “It’s the highest crime and misdemeanor one can think of, the case that they maliciously did this, and it obliges Democrats [who backed the war] to say they cast the wrong vote.” Wittmann is sharply critical of the administration’s performance in Iraq, but he supported the invasion and thinks Democrats would be ill-advised to drag the country into impeachment proceedings.

Impeachment???!!??? Impeachment – for what? For believing a CIA director who said, “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President”? For believing the same thing that Bill Clinton believed, that the UN believed, that France, England, Russia, the whole word believed? Remember, the pre-war argument from opponents of the invasion was that Saddam was contained, not that the intelligence was wrong, and no amount of revisionist history will change that.

Clift doesn’t realize that Fitzmas has already come and gone (and Eleanor, it’s not an annual holiday):

The more we learn about the secretive White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and the role of Vice President Dick Cheney in pressing his dark views on the country, the likelier it is that the administration will be found culpable for exaggerating the threat Saddam Hussein posed in its zeal to go to war. If the Democrats win back the House in the ’06 election, Michigan Democrat John Conyers will chair the House Judiciary committee. On the day the Scooter Libby indictments were handed down, Conyers invoked the language of Watergate: “What did the president and the vice president know, and when did they know it?” If the political tables turn, impeachment may not be so far-fetched after all.

Get the phrasing there: Cheney’s dark views. However, Clift does send a warning shot across the bow: for God’s sake, if the flatulent, foolish John Conyers chairs the Judiciary Committee, that prime example of the jackass species may very well do such an ignorant thing.

I can’t think of a better argument to fight, fight, fight for 2006. It’s time to take the gloves off…we’ve got the more powerful hand, and we need to start using it.