Legal Commentary

Depression is rage spread thin.
--George Santayana

Are we there yet? Is it "Super Tuesday"? No?

Shit.

Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad enough, but now we have Huckabee Derangement Syndrome, Clinton Derangement Syndrome, and on and on. David Brooks, The "House Conservative" of The New York Times, had a column last week in which he stated the obvious fact that most people make up their minds on who they will or will not vote for in an election based upon their feelings, then rationalize their emotional decision. That is a truism, as far as I'm concerned. The babble in the blogosphere from the right and from the left, excoriating all other candidates except the blogger's chosen one, and arguing the merits of the chosen one over all other alternatives, has become transparent support for Brooks' assertion.

As a Catholic, I was initially amused, then disgusted, by all the Catholics For Huckabee bloggers versus Catholics Against Huckabee bloggers, although it didn't quite astound me as much as the gyrations Catholics who love Rudy Giuliani have gone through to try to intellectually justify their emotional commitment to a man who supports a woman's right to kill her unborn child. The latest spin I've seen from Catholic bloggers who favor Rudy seems to be that we Catholics should look beyond Giuliani's rejection of fundamental Catholic doctrine and consider what kind of Supreme Court justices he would appoint, as if we could rely upon the man's intimation in the heat of a nomination battle that he'll appoint justices more pro-life than he is.

Here's what the National Catholic Register had to say about that deal with the devil:

But what dooms the deal from the start is the fact that it totally misunderstands what pro-lifers care about in the first place.

When they ask us to ?be reasonable? and go along with a pro-abortion leader, they assume that there is something unreasonable about the pro-life position to start with.

We?re sorry, but we don?t see what is so unreasonable about the right to life. We?ve seen ultrasounds, we?ve named our babies in the womb, we?ve seen women destroyed by abortion. What looks supremely unreasonable to us is that we should trust a leader who not only rejects the right to life but even supports partial-birth abortion, which is more infanticide than abortion.

We also see the downside of Rudy?s deal. If pro-lifers went along, we?d soon find out that a pro-abortion Republican president would no longer preside over a pro-life party. The power a president exerts over his party?s character is nearly absolute. The party is changed in his image.  He picks those who run it and, both directly and indirectly, those who enter it.

[...]

A Republican Party led by a pro-abortion politician would become a pro-abortion party. Parents know that, when we make significant exceptions to significant rules, those exceptions themselves become iron-clad rules to our children. It?s the same in a political party. A Republican Party led by Rudy Giuliani would be a party of contempt for the pro-life position, which is to say, contempt for the fundamental right on which all others depend.

Would a pro-abortion president give us a pro-life Supreme Court justice? Maybe he would in his first term. But we?ve seen in the Democratic Party how quickly and completely contempt for the right to life corrupts. Even if a President Giuliani did the right thing for a short time, it?s likely the party that accepted him would do the wrong thing for a long time.

Would his commitment to the war on terror be worth it? The United States has brought the first abortion business to Afghanistan ever. And that happened under a pro-life president. What would a pro-abortion president do?

The bottom line: Republicans have made inroads into the Catholic vote for years because of the pro-life issue. If they put a pro-abortion politician up for president, the gains they?ve built for decades will vanish overnight.

Don't get me wrong: I stand by my previous opinion that all of the candidates are essentially unworthy of office. They're all Babbitts. I don't "Heart" Huckabee or especially prefer him over Rudy. I'm merely tired of the arguments echoing in this chamber of nonsense called the blogosphere that we should support one hypocrite over another hypocrite based upon the assertion that the other hypocrites are somehow worse hypocrites than a blogger's favorite hypocrite. Most of it is nothing more elevated than verbal self-pleasuring.

Does any blogger honestly think that they are swaying an undecided person who reads their blog to vote for the candidate of their choice? I said "honestly." I seriously doubt that they're doing anything other than preaching to the choir. Of course, that's the hidden intent, isn't it? Holler into the echo chamber, and have the true believers holler back and, maybe, while they're at it, click on one of those Adsense or Amamzon.com ads, or maybe "donate" some money through the "tip jar."

Not long ago, I read where some of these bloggers are making $15,000 to $18,000 a month, some upwards of $250,000 a year, just from "click-through" revenues from advertising on their blogs. To do so, they feed the masses what they want to hear and appeal to those instincts that generate the most site traffic. Want to place a bet on whether such instincts are the baser or the higher?

Maybe it's just been a bad day, or a bad week. Maybe it's the fact that the failing health of family members has made me re-prioritize my concerns. Maybe it's the fact that while many bloggers chase their tails  in a never-ending circle of the same-old-same-old, the hungry go unfed, the naked unclothed, the traumatized uncomforted.

Maybe I'm just in the mood for some uninhibited dancin'. Maybe that'd improve my disposition.

Yeah, that's the ticket! I'd rather dance with you than talk with you, anyway.

Kings of Convenience, I'd Rather Dance With You (Yeah, I'm the dork in the glasses.)

UPDATE: I see that my friend Sherry shares my black dog mood.