Words of Wisdom Frist Will Not Heed

Kevin Patrick, writing at GOP Bloggers, has some important advice for Senate Majority leader Bill Frist about how to handle Democratic obstructionism over judicial nominees. He notes that Frist appears headed toward a Democratic trap.

Unfortunately, nothing today tells me that the current leadership sees the obvious parallels between the brinksmanship of 1990 and today. Additionally, nothing in the GOP leadership shows me they can procedurally out-maneuver an admittedly savvy opposition (they out-maneuvered the GOP on Bork, out-maneuvered the GOP on the 1990 budget, and out-maneuvered the GOP on the 1995 government shut-down).

Unless something un-dramatic happens and the GOP simply insists on a 24-hour, non-photo-op, talk 'till you are wasting the public's money and reading out of a phone book filibuster, the GOP will likely go to the extra-ordinary measure of going "nuclear" and lose the judicial nominee war (the Supremes and the 2006 and maybe 2008 elections), even if they win this current judicial nominee battle.

The whole read is short, and worth your look-see.

And I agree: let the Democrats talk their heads off in an actual standoff at the Senate podium. Make them stand there and fill time, for hours or days on end. Let self-important maroons like Kennedy, Byrd, Biden, Boxer, et al, run on at length for all of America to marvel over. There is absolutely no downside for the Republicans in doing this, and much to gain.

But I don't think Frist has the spine nor the vision to do it. He's slightly better than the grovelling Trent Lott was, but he's no tactician.

UPDATE: Chris Davis, that Pesky Fly Guy, just about pops a blood vessel over this post. Apparently the whole concept of "alliance of convenience," a staple of Democrat power, blows his mind when others try it.

I'm guessing he's got the tired old cliche of Libertarians as sexual libertines and drug users who want to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, damn the consequences and you, too, still in his head. Democrats and Republicans both believe people need government to protect them from themselves, an interesting view of humanity to say the least, and utterly self-serving of those who want power for themselves. I believe people should be left alone, to form society and communities as they see fit. If you find that unpleasant, then go form your own community in your own image or convince me that mine is wrong. Otherwise, leave me be.

Those who can't take care of themselves? To paraphrase a favorite saying of mine: "Be a good example or we'll just have to make you a horrible warning to others." The failures make the rest of us stronger. You may find that ugly, but it's how the world works. You go and form your own organisation to help them. Likely you'll find a lot of folks willing to help, generously so. Just don't make me support your crusade against my will, or take my money to do it. To those of you who now reflexively scream "Selfish bastard!" I remind you that I worked in a treatment center for nearly a decade, at less than minimum wage. I put my money where my mouth is.

I'm also a conservative, not in the narrow political sense but the larger sociocultural sense. Some changes are good, but experimenting with society (through government control) to create a utopia is just wrong. A pure conscience doesn't give anyone the right to tell me what to do, left or right. Ideas not grounded in reality, or only reached through pure philosphising, only harm society and should be avoided. For example, families are the best way of raising children. Society, and not government, should be backing that fundamental truth.

There's a problem, of course, between a democratic government -- where the individual is the base unit -- and a family-based society -- where the family group is the base unit. Extending government into the family gets us... well, where we are today. Make government retreat and let society sort it out. Will some folks be unhappy? Sure, but that the nature of life. Deal with it.

Democrats can make all the noise they want about being the "party of the people." They are not. They are the party of government control and social tinkering. Republicans have their own problems, but let's get the monster of government off our backs first, and then we'll deal with them.

Let me close this with a great and a propos quote from Neal Stephenson:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir.... We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.

Chris brought up Stalin but I'll remind him that it was a Democrat, Roosevelt, who dealt with him in the Forties. The overweening and ambitious Roosevelt knew he was deathly ill, but ran for an unprecedented fourth term anyway. By the time he got to Yalta, he was nearing death and unable to stand up to the robust Stalin. It took Republicans and a few anti-Communist Democrats (remember them?), being fought every step of the way by Democrats of the Socialist and Communist Left, to kill off the Soviet Union.

Anyway....