What a difference a week makes! Last week, liberals were expecting big things. They were counting on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the White House to do their work for them.

On Friday, Fitzgerald was supposed to indict Karl Rove. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were going to be named unindicted co-conspirators. Maybe Condoleezza Rice, too. Who knew – maybe even Clarence Thomas. There was even talk of a posthumous indictment for Nixon.

It was going to be Fitzmas Day! (Which is much like Christmas except instead of having her baby in a manger, the woman has a late-term abortion.) Oh, it was hard to fall asleep on Fitzmas Eve!

But Friday came, and only Irve Lewis Libby was accused of committing any crimes. They were all crimes like perjury and obstruction of justice, personal to Libby, unrelated to the administration.

Fitzmas sucked. Instead of GI Joe and Mr. Machine, all Democrats got was a lousy cardigan sweater.

With the Democrats still reeling from Friday's sad news, Bush gave them a right-hook by nominating the stunningly qualified Judge Sam Alito on Monday. (So I guess not all qualified candidates for the Supreme Court turned Bush down before he nominated Miers.)

Not only is Alito qualified, but he also does not consider membership in the Federalist Society comparable to joining the Klan. In other words, this was just the sort of judicial nominee that would have terrified the White House a month ago.

Judge Alito's dear 90-year-old mother – who evidently had not yet been briefed by White House political consultants to avoid stating positions popular with Americans – immediately said of her son, "Of course he's against abortion."

As a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, Alito voted to uphold a Pennsylvania statute passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor that required women to notify their husbands before getting an abortion. (This was later deemed an "undue burden" by liberals' favorite Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor.)

There is no question about Alito's qualifications. Democrats can only oppose him for his record, which will alarm a narrow segment of lunatics commonly known as "the Democratic Party base."

Now that timid Republicans are forced to face their fears, it turns out that liberal America was always a paper tiger. Americans are not rising in anger at a judicial nominee who would uphold a state law requiring husbands to be notified of their wives' abortions.

The only people attacking Alito for his abortion ruling are the usual nuts – Planned Parenthood, NARAL, People for the American Way and senators from New York and California (or what CBS thinks of as "the American heartland").

So confident are the Democrats about the popularity of their stance on abortion that the day after Alito's nomination, Senate Democrats shut down the Senate so they wouldn't be forced to talk about Alito.

Minority Leader Harry Reid dramatically invoked an obscure Senate rule to close the Senate for two hours, putatively in order to rehash old arguments about the Iraq war in closed session. In other words, Reid demanded more transparency in government by shutting the doors, throwing out the public, dimming the lights, and turning off the TV cameras in the chambers of the U.S. Senate. Continued...