BUSH MAKING HIS MARK WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT

Over the weekend I came across [http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060115/NEWS/601150403/1039|a really depressing article] from NYT and TheLedger.com about how George W. Bush is making his mark on the USG--a mark that will be around long after he leaves office--assuming he goes quietly ;). Here's a fun but depressing clip:

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

Great.

However--the interesting part of this article comes along later when it says:

Republicans have rejected Democratic assertions that Alito was out of the mainstream. "The American people see Judge Alito and say, `That's exactly the sort of person we want to see on the Supreme Court,' " said Steve Schmidt, the White House official who managed the nomination.

OH IS THAT THE WAY IT GOES, Mr. Schmidt? Why don't we hold this crap up to a national vote and see if it sticks, shall we?

In a country where its government has consistently proven that it doesn't know what it is doing, let alone what it's people are thinking, I suspect any Republican in government would be upset with what a vote would tell them about the public.

Here's another fun clip just for the hell of it:

"They have made a lot of progress," said Ronald A. Klain, a former Democratic chief counsel for the Judiciary Committee and the White House counsel in charge of judicial nominations for President Bill Clinton. "I hate to say they're done because Lord only knows what's next. They have achieved a large part of their objective."

Asked if he had any hope that Democrats could slow President Bush's effort to push the court to the right, Klain responded: "No. The only thing that will fix this is a Democratic president and more vacancies. It takes a long time to make these kinds of changes and it's going to take a long time to undo them."

Yeah, if there IS another Democrat president. I'm wondering why Bush would even step down at the end of 2008--he's broken a number of laws using rationalizations to tell us why he's legally allowed to do so. What's to stop him from saying that "in a time of war, it's not a good idea to have a new president"?

Seriously, he's lied to us, spied on us and now we expect him to go silently? Sure, it's likely he'll go silently, but I'm one blogger who is done being surprised by any absurdity spun from the Bush White House.