It's hip waders time in Washington D.C. again

Its amazing how fast the caca can pile up in Washington D.C. Here are a few examples from a Fox News Article entitled Dems Launch Pre-emptive Strike Before Myers Vote. The Myers vote refers to the fact that Senate Judicary Chairman Arlen Specter selected Bush judicial nominee William Myers for the first confirmation vote of the full Senate.

The first paragraph that caught my attention seems like a Democratic trap for the President:

Democrats have told the president to make a choice — an up-or-down vote on a handful of blocked judicial nominees or blockage of the rest of his agenda.

Bush said he doesn't want to make that choice.

"Hopefully, the Senate will be able to conduct business and also give my nominees a vote, an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate," the president said during a morning press conference.

The so-called nuclear option, which is the up-or-down vote on a handful of judicial nominees which will prompt Democratic Senators to block the rest of Bush's agenda, is really a procedural option relating to the Senate rules. As much as President Bush wants his judicial nominees to be confirmed, the fact that he is a President and not a Senator means that he doesn't have any authority at all over the Senate rules. Technically speaking either choice, if President Bush were to make a choice at all as the Democrats asked, would be interfering in the perogatives of the Senate. Given the passion with which the Senate has guarded it's perogatives in the past, Bush's position as stated in this article seems entirely reasonable.

Another thing that I noticed is a contradiction in what the Democrats are telling the public. The article states:

"The news reports today said we want to shut down the Senate. That couldn't be anything further from truth," said Reid of Nevada.

and also states:

"The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers called the 'cooling saucer of democracy' into the rubber stamp of dictatorship," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Think about this for a few moments. If you were a United States Senator and you discovered that the Senate ideologues were launching a coup against the lawful government of the United States, what would you do? Would you promise to make everything happily bipartisan again if only those nasty proto-dictators would just promise on their word of honor to be nice from then on? Or would you declare your undying opposition to the fascists and do everything in your power to defeat their plans and drive them from office?

If we assume that Senator Schumer is speaking literally, it appears that the Senate Minority leader is taking a shockingly indifferent stance to the incipient fascist takeover. On the other hand, if we assume that the Senate Minority leader is reasonably defending his party's legitimate political interest against an opposition party that is reasonably attempting to advance its legitimate political interests, then it appears that Senator Schumer has done what Democrats consider the most heinous of political crimes: unfair challenging of an opponent's patriotism.