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

The Orc attack

Lilleks:

Of the Strib's defense of Sen. Durbin I have nothing to say. Any editorial that describes Gitmo as a “hellhole” has no words left for any other actual holes o’hell, unless we’re going to layer hell like Dante, with different tiers for different states. I will note that more elderly people died of the Paris heat than appear to have perished from Gitmo conditions, but of course that doesn’t reflect on Paris, Parisiens, or the ability of the French to make air conditioners cheap and readily available. No, it’s this:

"By caving in, Durbin did just what the orchestrated right-wing smear effort required to succeed:"

Orchestrated? You really have to believe in all sorts of deep dark conspiratorial drivel to think that there was a coordinated effort. Apparently they believe that there’s a vast, well-oiled propaganda distribution machine with a big red handle in Karl Rove’s office; he throws the switch, and the information courses out to the talk shows and the blogs. You can think this if you wish, but you look foolish before anyone who has any experience in, oh, talk radio and blogs. It doesn’t have to be coordinated, because – and here’s the key point the editorial writer might want to consider in a calm moment – some people are actually honestly irritated by Durbin’s comments, and came to the conclusion on their own, without having their puppet strings yanked. True. And those people, thus irked, set about to communicated their irkedness to others, sometimes by the use of a voice-amplifying device called “a microphone,” or by the keyboard-input devices attached to their personal computers. Often time one would refer to the other – not because the tickertape in the corner clattered out a command to add another link to the right-wing daisy-chain noise-machine, but because a new point had been made, a telling quote unearthed, a common suspicion eloquently phrased.

It looks orchestrated from the outside, but if you knew nothing of humans, sports, or basketball, you might well assume it was not a competition but a rather energetic form of cooperative dance.

How come I did not get my notice to dump on Durbin? There is a conceit hidden in this charge that conservatives are not smart enough to speak their mind without some script. Psychologist call this projection.