Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Dealing witht he Lilliputs

Suzanne Fields:

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At the end of the 20th century an imaginary character became a frequent visitortowonk conversations, with the United States compared to Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Jonathan Swift's classic "Gulliver's Travels," who finds himself sunk in the sand on a beach in the kingdom of Lilliput, whose tiny inhabitants have tied him down with threads and pegs. Gulliver can hardly move.
"In this telling, the international community — that comfortable euphemism for the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and other U.N. agencies and the massed ranks of Non-Governmental Organizations — sought to constrain America's freedom of action in a web of international laws, regulations and treaties such as the Kyoto accords," writes John O'Sullivan in New Criterion magazine. These Lilliputians have also been called "Tranzi's," the hip jargon for transnational organizations that seek to impose participation in "global governance," to impose "global tests" that serve the interests of "the international community" and not ours.
The Lilliputians as invented by Swift are little men marked by moral pettiness, trivializing pretense and obsession with pompous "points of honor." The United States has acted in accord with the Lilliputians in certain acts of humanity, where common interests meet, but the Lilliputians have generally tried to constrain Gulliver through propaganda and the contrived pressure of public opinion. Gulliver was unbound by September 11, as Mr. O'Sullivan notes, but "Gulliver's Travels" has since become "Gulliver's Travails."
Gulliver unbound means that the United States after September 11 could make an end run around the Lilliputians to appeal to coalitions of the willing to help in the fight against evil in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the United Nations or other international groups would not approve, independent nations could become allies in important ways: by recognizing the specific threat, supporting our approach to resolving it and by contributing resources. President Bush added a fourth component, introducing democracy in the Arab and Muslim world where self-government is an alien concept.
Gulliver thus becomes considerably bolder and more aggressive than Swift imagined. Swift himself was a deeply devout Christian, and did not believe as many of his contemporaries of the Enlightenment did that man can on his own transcend human limitations. Swift appealed to the moral and spiritual qualities — in a word, faith — that separate man from beast and enable him to rise above his animal nature. The Enlightenment never lived up to its promise that man could become perfect, or even move very far toward perfectibility. The Nazis and now the Islamists have proved that in our own era.
If we are to see America as Gulliver among Lilliputians, Gulliver should be perceived as an awkward, imperfect, but gentle giant who must not allow those with Lilliputian agendas to tie us down. We no longer have the optimism we felt when the statue of Saddam Hussein came tumbling down in Baghdad. The radical Iraqi insurgency is more widespread than we anticipated, perhaps because we eased the pressure in places like Fallujah in deference to the Lilliputians. But that's no longer the case and the Iraqi people are better off for our intervention. They have been freed from a dictator whose brutality rivals any in history. The Iraqis can speak freely, read and write freely and are pressing toward authentic elections.
Our own interests have been served. Gulliver unbound fosters democracy and pursues the war against Islamist terrorism, with no help from the Lilliputians....