Question: how many “bases” does the President have, exactly? I mean, for years we’ve been hearing from Democrats and the legacy media how James Dobson, Hugh Hewitt, the evangelicals, et al, are Bush’s “right wing” conservative base—but these are the very people who, in addition to GOP party pragmatists, by and large were most supportive of the Miers nomination.
And yet today, all I’m hearing is that Bush caved to his “extremist” “right wing base.”
Can we have a bit of a clarification, please? Is Hugh Hewitt part of the Republican base or is he not? Is James Dobson? Or will these Miers supporters now be embraced by Chuck Schumer and Pat Leahy and Barbara Boxer as “moderates”?
To be clear, this is not a knock on Hugh and company at all; instead, it is a challenge to a lazy media—who has long accepted as objectively true the Democratic characterization of Bush’s base as hardline Christian social conservatives—to pick a referent for their favorite, loosely-wielded signifier, and stick to it.
****
update: Cass Sunstein, TNR:
After the withdrawal of Harriet Miers, the question is whether any nominee who is acceptable to the president’s base will be acceptable to the country. For the first time in the nation’s history, this is a serious question. Here’s the reason: Much of the base is asserting a series of litmus tests, both on particular issues and in general. A nominee who passes the litmus tests will face terrible problems in the Senate…
And yet John Roberts got through—and the 22 nay votes came from Democrats.
No, the only “litmus” tests being proposed by the “base” (which consists of who again? Howsabout a little clarity, Cass) is that the nominee show a demonstrable fealty to the Constitution and an underlying philosophy of restraint. That such an attitude—which should be the attitude of every jurist, given that those are characteristics that properly define a judiciary—has come to represent a “litmus test” to some is simply proof that the courts have wandered away from the proper nature of jurisprudence.
Confirmations have become increasingly difficult precisely because there is a battle on to keep the court a stealth superlegislature.
Jeff,
Bases, bases everywhere. From the same media that reflexively characterized Kommie Kremlin gulag-stockboys as “conservatives.”
Cordially…
BECAUSE OF THE AMBIHUGHITY!
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO TEH MEDIA!!1!
(Sorry…I just couldn’t help myself.)
All your base are belong to… whoever the media thinks they should belong to.
Anyone that disagrees with the mainstream media’s current groupthink is an “extremist right-winger.” Doesn’t matter if they were a moderate, or even a lefty, last week.
Damm you, Sean. 30 seconds too late on the submit button.
Great minds, Matt.
These are perhaps the most reprehensible comments I have ever heard in my entire life–and perhaps in all of recorded history–but I’ve come to expect as much from the theo-fascist right-wing brownshirts on this site. HOW DARE you slime the good names of non-partisan moderates like James Dobson and Hugh Hewitt? What’s next, are you going to “leak” LIES about their wives to your reichwing propagandist Judith Miller, just because they DARED Speak Truth To Power against your extremist Bu$hitler regime? Don’t try to FOOL me by posting comments from allegedly “liberal” sites like the Daily Kos, which mirror some of your “concerns” over Meirs’ qualifications; it doesn’t take a genius like Harry Reid to see through your LIES.
I give you the most damning condemnation in the history of letters:
WANKER OF THE DAY
I see your FASCIST site won’t let me correct my spelling of Miers’ name in the above; how convenient that your US-controlled internet goes out of its way to make someone Speaking Truth To Power look like an illiterate moron. STOP SUPPRESSING MY DISSENT
Gosh
I wish I could have thunk that up
Jeff et al, I think Bush’s strategy was to use Miers to generate exactly the debate we got.
Maybe Rove knew that the name-calling surrounding Mier’s nomnation would highlight the incongruencies in referents used by the legacy media, further damaging their credibility, and contributing to their more exact wielding of their signifiers in the future.
Language matters, man!
-Steve
to pick a referent for their favorite, loosely-wielded signifier, and stick to it
In all fairness to the media, they have. They haven’t even admitted that the Christian Right has bee supportive of Miers – they’re still peddling the lie that they don’t. So the current media spin seems to fall in line with that thinking.
JMHO
TV (Harry)
develop: I’m developing a headache.
Uh, Jeff, “extremist right-wing base”? That would be you, my brother. That would be us.
“Rule of law?” “Equal protection of the laws?” “Right of the People?” Those all got reclassified a long time ago, dude. The idea that a judge should apply the law as written instead of just making shit up? Very radical. Dangerous even. At least until we change it.
Yours/
peter.
The local radio did the “extreme right wing base” bit then a couple minutes later were playing a Schumer clip saying Miers was a poor choice. My co-workers think I am nuts because I laugh during the news more than the “funny” bits of the regular programming.
Also in fairness to the media, they just aren’t that bright, are lazy, and bathed in parochialism. They figure all “Republicans” are cut from the same Elmer Gantry-ish cloth.
Whereas I prefer the soft cuts and cleaner lines of the new “Wolfowitz” line of war criminal casual wear. Don’t have to pay for dry cleaning, for one.
A dear friend of mine–whom I forgive for being a Democrat, and whom I now forgive for being stark, raving mad–sent me a letter yesterday claiming that the Republican party is actually in thrall to a cabal of wealthy ‘Christian Reconstructionist’ wackos–worse than the Taliban–whose goal is to bring about a Biblical fascist government in the United States that will literally murder all dissenters and end Democracy As We Know It. Much to my surprise, devil incarnate George W. Bush is spearheading this effort. (And he thought he problems with the Miers nomination.)
This is a leftist conspiracy theory of which I was previously ignorant.
A little googling unearthed a surprising wealth of similiar hallucinatory cogitations. (You’ll have to do your own googling. I can’t give these morlocks the dignity of linkage.) In any event, this theory is on the same level as the ‘moon-landing hoax’, Bush ‘ordering’ jets into the World Trade Center and the existence of Bigfoot–100% pure horseshit. There may, indeed, be people calling themselves Christian Reconstructionists–or Dominionists as they’re also called–but all seven of them do not a conspiracy make. Hell, they probably can’t even throw a decent cocktail party.
In his mind, however, they have been taking over the Republican Party for the last 20 years and are an imminent threat to Humanity. My friend is so upset, he worries about it constantly.
He is incapable of seeing that the Republicans are now composed of philosophical Conservatives, social traditionalists, Classical Liberals, Liberal Hawks, disaffected Democrats, Libertarians, and others–in addition to religious conservatives, who wield much less power than he may suppose. Apparently, every one of us is tarred as part of this conspiracy, regardless of the facts. It’s all globalized into one incorrect conception.
My poor friend has been completely ravaged by this virus. It might not be worth mentioning at such length but that he is, of all things, a Princeton grad. I guess it just demonstrates how much trouble we’re.
Hey APF, I’ve spelled it Meirs too. That is the right spelling. Harriet can’t even spell her own name right. For that alone she doesn’t deserve to be on the Supreme Court. What if she wrote the majority opinion on overturning Roe and spelled it “Row”, then it wouldn’t count and we’d be back to square one.
LOL that’s because the neoKKKons don’t believe the dictionary was “intelligently designed.”
DON’T SUPPRESS MY FREEDOM TO CHOOSE HOW I SPELL THINGS
target=”_blank”> Top 10 reasons George Bush’s screwed the pooch on Harriet Miers
“What if she wrote the majority opinion on overturning Roe and spelled it “Rowâ€Â, then it wouldn’t count and we’d be back to square one.”
If she did write it as “Row”, she could join Justice Thomas in his answer to the following:
Q. Justice Thomas, what is your opinion of the “Row” v. Wade decision?
A. I don’t really care HOW the Mexicans get across the border.
To the media, the “extremist” right wing base of the Republican party includes anybody who is actually Republican, rather than a wishy-washy swing voter. Folks in the MSM don’t know anybody who votes Republican, hence anyone who would vote for those knuckledragging, greedy, gay-bashing billionaires is either “extremist” or a pitiable victim duped into voting against economic self-interest by the Rove spin machine.
Here’s my take: (assuming this wasn’t all a grand scheme–I’m not quite ready to believe that level of conspiracy exists)
Someone, somewhere, made the mistaken assumption that Conservatives would rally behind a SCOTUS nominee baed solely upon that nominee’s position on Roe. Conservatives have been characterized by the MSM as largely “one-topic” activists, when conservatism actually extends from issues of morality into concerns about fiscal responsibility and judicial restraint. It is a way to approach government that seeks to limit the Federal government’s power over the individual, while expanding the powers of local, more responsive government entities to deal with their own problems and situations. I’m convinced that many members in the GOP bought into the MSM’s false representation of conservative philosophy, and what we witnessed was a backlash from true conservatives against the party loyalists who do lip service to conservative concerns once every election.
As I said on another blog, the GOP needs to heed the old admonition, “Dance with the one who brought you.”
The problem, Bo, is that any major American political party is made up of many different factions and groups who happen to be going (somewhat) in the same direction, most of the time. So when someone says “the base was against it” the reality is that some of the base was against it, but not all of it. I wasn’t against it, and I am part of the base.
Unless you define base to mean “only people who think exactly like I do”, in which case it becomes a pretty narrow base, indeed.
You want clarification from the media? You want the media to tell the truth? You’re being facetious, right? You couldn’t seriously have expected the media to portray this as anything else than right-wing extremists controlling the President?
THE MEDIA OWES PROTEIN WISDOM AN ANSWER – PREFERABLY IN THE FORM OF A LENGTHY QUESTIONNAIRE!
So if we go with Bush we are goose-stepping kool-aid drinkers, and if we disagree the party is on it’s heels in complete disarray. What happened to that bullshit they are always spouting during the filming of those al-Jazeera spots about dissension being a healthy component of democracy?
We are part of Bush’s base; we are mostly conservative; and we aren’t afraid to freely disagree with him when we believe he’s gone wrong.
So why does “free base conservatives” sound so wrong, as a political taxon?
As for Miers, it doesn’t take Einstein to explain the lesson in this for the President.
(Thanks to The Commissar for the Einstein pic generator.)
The strict constructionists are his base; the evangelicals are.
The nominatioin wasn’t hurt because Bush pandered to his Christian base, he was hurt because he pandered to his Christian base with a stealth nominee that was nothing but code words and hand signals. The refusal to nominate someone with real credentials ended up betraying a lesser-but-not-insignificant part of his support. As Miers’s record on the stuff that matters to the evangelicalswas too muddled for them to stand up for her in the face of overwhelming opposition from their allies among the strict constructionists.
One base, two significant and distinct (though overlapping) groups of supporters.
“The country” being who, exactly? That part of the electorate that ISN’T the base?
I just want to know when exactly it was that people have been allowed to forget that the president actually, you know, won the goddamn election?
’Free-base Conservative’ has a nice ring to it…
Ahem, regarding your 12:40 post:
Most Democrats in NYC (Dems outnumbering Reps by a 6:1 margin) believe in the conspiracy theory you’ve outlined–perhaps not as precisely defined as spearheaded by “Christian Reconstructionists” or “Dominionists”, but surely by fundamental Christians.
The irony I enjoy is that none of my fellow members of the VRWC fit this definition.
But then those believing the conspiracy theory you outlined suffer from BDS, so there’s room for logical reasoning from those quarters.
Cheers.
Mikey, that was sort-of the point I was trying to make. Conservatism can’t be shoehorned into a one-topic philosophy. The attitude I felt as if the GOP was giving towards conservatives was something like “She’s anti-abortion. Isn’t that enough?”
The answer was a resounding “NO.”
The idea from the MSM is that the “radical religious” base shot down the nomination. In their eyes, there are a multitude of dangerous “bases” in the GOP, all of whom need to be stopped, or at least ignored. What this seemed to prove is that a significant portion of the base will not blindly support the President when he insists upon being just what we voted against last fall: a spineless “everything to everyone” leader.
True enough, Mr. Goldstein… as far as the media is concerned, “Republican” and “extreme right” are interchangeable terms.
Here lately “Democrat” and “extreme left” also appear to be interchangeable terms.
TW: The efforts of the Democrats to put lipstick on a pig hasn’t disguised the fact that it is still a pig.
“Can we have a bit of a clarification, please?”
Its really not that hard to identify who was displeased. Its the worst of the worst, the people who want to undo griswold. Some others went along with Miers, being more partisan than ideologues. I saw it at school too. Its embarassing to see. But we can’t let that confuse us as to what stopped this nomination.
Well, that pegs me.
Griswold?!? WTF?
On a rather tenuously-connected note, does anyone else find it side-splittingly funny when the Dems go ballistic about overturning Roe in the context of “making abortion illegal”?
After all, Roe was a judicial power-grab that imposed a Federal ban on abortion-related lawmaking. If Roe gets tossed, it would still take specific action to make abortion illegal, or to limit it in any way….it would require a legislature to pass a law—and on the Federal level, that would be one that would be enacted by the House and the Senate.
So when these Senators get on their high-horses and talk about how horrible it would be if Roe were overturned and “abortion rights” were limited, they’re really saying that they couldn’t be trusted to restrain themselves from passing anti-abortion legislation without their judicial overlords’ ban.
Personally, I’m all in favor of a woman’s right to choose—and would strongly urge my legislative representatives to preserve this in all jurisdictions—but would consign Roe to the dustbin of history in a blink if only I could. But when a US Senator gets up and starts lecturing SCOTUS candidates about Roe, I end up ROTFL.
Does actus ever make sense? I know what all those words mean, but together they’re incoherent.
You’ll get your clarification once you stop jockeying amongst yourselves over who the base is on any given day. Face it, you like taking turns being daddy’s favorite. The elites pretend to be deferential so long as the inferiors know their place and when to step aside. Daddy got it wrong this time and the ‘base’ was not pleased.
I like expressing my opinion. I would have to register as a Republican and be involved in their politics to be considered part of the “base” I would think.