Eh, who the hell cares.Republicrat, I wasn't being sarcastic. And the primary strawman was that I think I know better than the general public (for lack of a better term).
I don't believe for a minute that I know better. The general public is at least as capable as I am of knowing the score.
I learned it, and there's absolutely no reason why anybody else couldn't (especially if I can).
But unfortunately the loudest speakers in this particular election were clowns and liars (jokers to the right), and that goes for all of the 3rd party advertising — although even Butler's 3rd party supporters were several orders of magnitude more honest than Gableman's. Or, the worst of the worst, Gableman's own.
I've never even implied that I think I know better than the general public, only that the general public may not follow these things as closely as some of us do.
And the some of us who do that followed this one especially closely found it pretty easy to separate the bereshite from the bullsh*t (pardon the uncharacteristically timid asterisk; I heard this was a family blog).
But hardly anybody was listening to us, or else they would have listened if they even knew we existed. We don't have 50k watts and the public airwaves [insert Fairness Doctrine joke here] over which to howl like a stuck primate every morning.
That's all I'm sayin'.
How strong is your assertion on Sam Sarver's blog? How incompetent must a "liberal" be for you to vote for a meritorious "conservative"?
I mean it. As for the hypothetical, let's just say that if the roles were reversed, I'd have had a Gableman sign on my lawn. H*ll, I'd have sewn a Gableman patch on my suit jacket, like the WMC one he has on his robe.
And the reason I said I'd changed my mind about electing vs. appointing Supreme Court judges is not because I don't think the voters can handle it. It's because the nominee couldn't handle it.
He has a responsibility — indeed, an obligation — to at least treat the office he seeks with respect. And he failed on that account. Miserably.
So it's no fault of the general public. It's the fault of people who want to abuse the court's function because they have enough money to do it and they need to protect that investment so they're more than willing to say anything in service of that money.
[Seriously, have you ever heard anyone refer to the United States Constitution as a "needless technicality" — in fact, the very provision that none other than Justice Antonin Scalia was vigorously defending the other day (on precisely the same grounds as Justice Louis Butler)?]
And putting a stop to that is worth the price of removing the selection process from the relatively small number of people who bother to exercise it anyway. I'm only talking about the Supreme Court, incidentally.
A competent Supreme Court comprised of our best legal minds is surely the least we can expect for this great State. We have an abundance of those minds here, and we shouldn't settle for less.
An appointment process can at least ensure that only the most talented are considered to begin with and the general public can continue to participate in whatever "liberal" vs. "conservative" controversy erupts then. But the debate will necessarily be of a higher quality. Anything would be of better quality than the recent unpleasantness.
Surely the general public would appreciate a more heightened debate as opposed to getting taken for and treated as suckers by third-party special interest groups, most of whom do not have the public's own special interests at heart whatsoever.
Whom did you vote for in the Sykes-Butler campaign?
Dude I didn't even know who either of them were until about six years later.
And I wouldn't tell you who I voted for anyway. You're not supposed to do that, are you? It's a sacred trust. But the statute of limitations has run on at least one of my secret ballots, and I can now reveal that I voted for Sheila Copps in 1986.
I think that was the year Brian Mulroney's Conservatives (yes, that's actually the name of the party — there's no "Democrat," "Republican" euphemisms up there) went from 275 seats in the House of Commons to three. Know what that was? Reagan fatigue. It penetrated even the icy fjords of Bay and King Sts. Those were the days my friend.
I once voted for Shirley Chisholm ... that was another time and place, too.
ReplyDeleteI'd do it again, though. Hell of a woman.
It didn't matter that Gableman didn't have the experience or the obvious talent to do the job. It only mattered that he'd positioned himself as a conservative in a supposedly non-partisan race, that he could assure his backers that he'd follow along the party line, given the chance.
ReplyDeleteIt was pure party politics. Merit was laughed at. If you ask the question as "How incompetent must a conservative be before conservatives wouldn't vote for him?", the answer is clearly "Less qualified than Gableman."
And what do we get from Esenberg at the end of it all? "He'll do fine," as if he was the boss's dull cousin who needed a job on the loading dock.
"Patch on his robe?" B&K, March 24.
If you ask the question as "How incompetent must a conservative be before conservatives wouldn't vote for him?", the answer is clearly "Less qualified than Gableman."
ReplyDeleteI spoke to someone yesterday, who would know, and they told me that even the "conservatives" on the court, including Annette Ziegler, privately supported Justice Butler's retention.
This isn't surprising at all, and speaks another few volumes of Justice Butler's intellect and collegiality and the high regard in which he's held by his colleagues, including those who disagree strongly with a number of his opinions.
It also speaks highly of Justice Ziegler and the other conservatives.
Ziegler isn't the only non-liberal justice supporting Butler.
ReplyDeleteMilwaukee Magazine had a piece about the respective justices:
"Crooks, despite his name, is considered highly honorable, a “real gentleman and great ambassador of the court,” says one fan. More than any other justice, Crooks is hard to peg as liberal or conservative and draws fire from both camps. He was expected to step down, then made the surprise decision to run for re-election in 2006. One reason may be that he’s developed a close friendship with Justice Louis Butler. Says one Crooks acquaintance: “I think it’s the first time he’s had a friend [on the court], and he’s having fun.”
I wonder if we see Crooks step down now. That would be a shame, he is willing to look at every case on its own facts and is not tied to idologies.
So the question should be "How partisan must a conservative be before not voting for an incompetent SC candidate?"
ReplyDeleteAs I put it to the Shark, I'd vote for him over Gableman any day.