Darth Vader

I see your Cheney has now joined the filibuster fray, Bush. What a bloody farce this whole thing is getting to be. Says your Cheney, arrayed in that cloak of reason he puts on to hide his monomania, "There is no justification for the blocking of nominees who are well qualified and broadly supported." Well, there's a subjective judgment, if ever there was one. "Broad support" does not reflect what I have heard about these nominations: your people get in a huff about "activist" judges when they disagree with their decisions. The "activism" that accords with their views, however, is apparently just dandy. Then it gets "broad support."

What a load of bullshit, Bush. I'm sorry about the language, but I'm really losing patience with all this. The solution to the filibuster problem is for you to stop insisting on wildly inappropriate, in-your-face nominations--and not only the judicial ones: think, currently, of your Bolton--and to withdraw those that clearly do not have "broad support" in that large segment of the population that did not vote for you. That would end the filibuster in a minute. But the goal, it seems, is to fully and finally disempower the opposition. If I weren't so angry about it, I'd have to admire the gall. You take a relatively narrow election victory and turn it into an unprecedented grab for unrestricted power. Now, it seems, you're doing everything you can to consolidate it.

It may take years, Bush, or it may happen sooner than you fear, but all this will come back to haunt your people one of these days. Given the permission this country persists in giving you, it will come back, I fear, to haunt us all.