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By Mark Follman

May 5, 2005 | With the Senate back in session next week and the moment of reckoning upon the Republicans' so-called nuclear option to wipe out the judicial filibuster, the rhetoric from the far right has gone radioactive.

"The art of politics today is not to compromise, but to demonize," Brian Fahling of the American Family Association aptly noted on Wednesday. He was in fact referring to a recent speech by Al Gore denouncing the Republican effort to dismantle the filibuster as "an American heresy." Fahling went on to say that "Democrats like Mr. Gore wish to continue populating the federal courts with judges who fancy themselves masters of good and evil," and that "holding President Bush's nominees hostage is their only hope, as they see it, of continuing to impose their radical social agenda on a reluctant nation."

James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who previously offered glowing remarks likening Supreme Court justices to members of the Ku Klux Klan, revisited the Terri Schiavo saga in his April newsletter to constituents. "This cooperative effort between the judiciary and the media to kill an innocent woman," he said, "is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history."

"Judicial hostility to faith, and especially Christianity has never been greater than today," Dobson went on. He urged supporters to pressure the seven "squishy" Republicans who haven't committed to nuking the filibuster.
And he personally warned the legislators not to squander their party's rare grip on power:

"You have been made the majority in the House, in the Senate, and a Republican occupies the White House. Together they represent the coveted 'Triple Crown' of American politics. If you fritter away the responsibility to reform the courts, and if you ignore the 'values' that motivated those who supported you at the polls, you do not deserve the trust given to you."

Death to the filibuster cult
If the GOP does go nuclear, will the Dems go the way of Waco? Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal, says that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is "acting like David Koresh" over the judicial filibuster. He foresees a fiery ending to the standoff.

"For Democrats, judicial philosophy is a cultural Armageddon," Henninger wrote. "Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy have turned the Senate into a Branch Davidian compound. No one in the liberal cult is allowed to leave, including the hostage nominees -- unless they recant their conservatism. How many Senate Democrats plan to be in this bunker when Bill Frist's ATF squad detonates the 'nuclear option'?"

The good of bad cop
While the filibuster wars tarnish America on the home front, military historian and Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson is arguing that a surge of anti-Americanism around the globe may actually be a good thing:

"Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and 'to work with our allies.' The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right -- and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track."

The autocrats and militants of the Middle East, Hanson says, are "deeply terrified by what is going on in Iraq. Mostly this animus arises because we are distancing ourselves from corrupt grandees, even as we have become despised as incendiary democratizers by the Islamists. Is that risky and dangerous? Yes. Bad? Hardly."

The not-so-unwelcome animosity, Hanson says, isn't limited to the Arabs: The United Nations (which "has sadly become a creepy organization"), the European Union (a "silly, vast complex of bureaucrats" trying "to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think"), and Mexico (which "enjoys one of the richest landscapes in the world" but "can't feed its own people, so it exports its poorest to the United States") all contribute a healthy rancor.

"America should not gratuitously welcome such dislike," Hanson says, "but we should not apologize for it either." Rather, it is "often reason to be proud, since much of the invective arises from the growing American insistence on principles abroad."

One has to wonder if those principles include the launching of a new dirty war in the Middle East, or the Bush government's secret "rendering" of terrorist suspects into the hands of regimes that torture them. (Hanson himself has in fact argued that complicity in torture is a bad idea.)

Hanson concludes his case for America the not-so-beautiful by surveying a global landscape of potential ingrates:

"When Europe orders all American troops out; when Japan claims our textbooks whitewash the Japanese forced internment or Hiroshima; when China cites unfair trade with the United States; when South Korea says get the hell off our DMZ; when India complains that we are dumping outsourced jobs on them; when Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians refuse cash aid; when Canada complains that we are not carrying our weight in collective North American defense; when the United Nations moves to Damascus; when the Arab Street seethes that we are pushing theocrats and autocrats down its throat; when Mexico builds a fence to keep us out; when Latin America proclaims a boycott of the culturally imperialistic Major Leagues; and when the world ignores American books, films, and popular culture, then perhaps we should be worried. But something tells me none of that is going to happen in this lifetime."