Friday, February 20, 2004

PRYOR COMMITMENTS

People is weird. They act like the President is doing something wrong putting a crony on the US Court of Appeals. Like politics was a game of everybody getting along! Politics is a game of fixing the rules so's you and your friends don't just get the biggest pieces of the pie - you get the whole pie plus the ice cream on top and, if you're really good, the silverware stashed in your pockets when you get home.

Pryor being a loudmouthed true-believer of anti-everything-but-what-I-am-comfortable-believing fits nicely at the Bush banquet. You know, where they drink to trickle-down without spilling a drop. Where they feed relative values to the dogs and serve relative facts as the main course. Where ushering in a kinder, gentler era means teaching liberals they should be seen and not heard. Where Truth, Justice, and the American Way are ends that justify any means, including Lies, Inequality, and Corporate Profiteering.

This is politics as it should be. Clinton, he actually tried to appoint centrist judges, and look where it got him. Nowhere. Senator John Ashcroft was the architect of "Block that Judicial Appointment." Moderation does not balance extremism. Clinton played fair and look where that leaves us. If he had appointed a few radical lesbian feminists and some Nation of Islam activists to the Federal bench during recesses, the Senate would have buckled and let him have his moderate judges without a squeak. But your high-minded Democrats play fair so they can keep the moral high ground and lost the war of politics for the rest of us. We is stuck with Pryor and there's no drag queen on the 11th Court of Appeals to balance out his extremism.