My thoughts on the Miers nomination

The Supremes, and the Republic, will survive Harriet Miers if she's confirmed; there have been plenty of mediocrities on the Supreme Court before and we've muddled through.

The sound that you hear from the far-right-wing blogosphere and traditional conservative media commentariat, however, is the sound of a bunch of extremist religious and cultural conservatives finally waking up to the fact that the Bush family has been using them like a cheap whore at a bachelor party.

For years now.

Poor paleocons. They were spoiling for a fight, and now they're all dressed up for Kulturkampf with no place go to. Bush has nominated a cipher, a person whose sole qualifications are a pair of X chromosomes and a demonstrated history of loyalty to Dubya.

I realize that this analogy may offend some, but it's just become too obvious to ignore:

Religious conservatives are to the Republican Party as African Americans are, largely, to the Democrats. The party makes extravagant promises to them, and a big show of caring about them, but rarely delivers anything important or substantial to them; they depend on them to vote as a bloc in their favor, because, you know, what are they gonna do, vote for "the other side?"

For all the noise that the Religious Right makes, and for all the apparent energy and enthusiasm that the GOP leadership devotes to kissing their collective asses, the Republican Party has yet to deliver on one single issue of primary importance to them. Not one.

And they won't, either. They need the scary issues like abortion and gay rights to stay active, so that they can rattle peoples' cages and whip them into a frenzy of check-writing indignation and get out the vote on Election Day.

You know, sooner or later, that's going to stop working.

Can you hear that? The sound of hoofbeats in the near distance?