I swear. If John Kerry
didn’t exist, Karl Rove would have to invent him.
To review the bidding:
Senator Kerry is not a member of the Judiciary Committee
and, therefore, has not had any role in the Punch & Judy
play named: The Sam Alito Hearings.
His colleague from
Massachusetts, Senator Edward Kennedy, made such a corned
beef hash of things with his questioning of Alito on his
membership in some Princeton alumni association, that
Alito’s nomination wasn’t damaged nearly as much as
Kennedy’s fading reputation was.
Led by Ted Kennedy, the
Senate Democrats hoped to trip Judge Alito up in the
Judiciary Committee hearings. Instead, they ended up
tripping over each other like Larry, Moe & Curley in the
pie-throwing scene.
Rather than taking their
lumps and getting Alito off the agenda as quickly as
possible, the Democratic leadership responded to the
MoveOn.org/George Soros/National Abortion Rights Action
League wing of the Democratic Party by (a) holding up the
committee vote by a week; then, (b) demanding three full
days of floor debate to renew their now-childish carping
about Judge Alito.
All though this, nary a word
was heard from the once and future Democratic Presidential
hopeful, John Heinz Kerry.
Which brings us to today’s
mini-filibuster.
I have written before that
members of the United States Senate take their title,
“Senator,” very seriously. If they thought they could get
away with it, they would wear togas.
John Kerry, not being
involved in the Alito deal, must have been told by his
crack political advisors that drinking champagne with
globalization-crazed-mega-corporate CEOs was probably not
going to earn him any points with the gals from NOW or
NARAL.
Senator Kerry is renowned for
being a man o’ the people when he is not skeet shooting,
piloting his twin engine plane, wind surfing or – as he
was last week – hobbing and nobbing with the rich and
famous in Davos, Switzerland singing the Ricola cough drop
song.
So, Kerry got into the story
by calling for a filibuster. Problem was, he was in
Switzerland and filibusters are generally conducted on the
floor of the Senate.
White House press secretary
Scott McClellan got off a pretty good line: “I think even
for a Senator, it takes some pretty serious yodeling to
call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the
Swiss Alps.”
Rather than getting the Alito
story off the front pages last Friday, so Alito would be
old news by now, here’s what John Kerry has handed the
President:
- The Senate will take up
the Alito matter today. There will be a motion to cut off
debate (“cloture”) which will pass easily.
- On Tuesday morning, the
Senate will vote on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to
be an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court which will
be approved by a comfortable margin.
- On Tuesday afternoon
Judge Alito will be sworn in.
- On Tuesday evening, at
his State of the Union Address, the President will point to
Justice Alito sitting with his brethren in the front
row of the House chamber and, one suspects, to Mrs. Alito
sitting in the Lenny Skutnik seat in the gallery next to
the First Lady.
- The Republicans in the
Chamber will rise to their feet, hooting and hollering.
- The Democrats will, most
of them, pat their hands together politely.
- The hard-Left Democrats
will be scowling and thinking very Unsenatorial thoughts
about Kerry and Kennedy.
Look for Chuck Schumer,
equally vexed to have been pushed out of the story, to do
something equally worthless over the next 36 hours.
New – and very serious – Topic
ABC News Anchor Bob Woodruff
and cameraman Doug Vogt were injured covering the war in
Iraq over the weekend after the vehicle in which they were
riding was attacked using an Improvised Explosive Devise
(IED).
Covering a war is a dangerous
business. Covering this war is more so because of the
nature of the attacks and the attackers.
Reporters do not spend their
days dawdling in the Green Zone. Most of them have lived
and worked in the very dangerous areas outside of the Green
Zone and outside of Baghdad.
I hope you will join me in
praying for Woodruff and Vogt as well as for every other
civilian and every member of the military injured or killed
in this war.
On a the Secret Decoder
Ring page today: A quick look at Ricola; a long
look at the Lenny Skutnik reference; a reminder about the
dangers of IEDs and silly Mullfoto and a snarky Catchy
Caption of the Day featuring the Very, Very,
Kerrys.
