Started to attach this as an update to that first SCOTUS post down below, but it’s just too damned good not to have a post of its very own.
You threaten to riot? You threaten to shut it all down? You show up at McConnell’s house to protest the very night RBG dies? Fine. Do that and I’ll advocate for hardball to be played right back with the ball to be hit directly into your face. You want it, you got it.
It isn’t just last night. This is the accumulation of decades of ever increasing nastiness re: Republican SCOTUS nominations. This is the threats of court packing, this is hearing vileness, this is *gestures* all of it. I didn’t want this game. But I’ll play it to win.
Since we’re going to play this stupidest possible game, then play it as hard as possible. I want the nomination Monday, the vote Tuesday, and the swearing in on Wednesday. Hearings are an insulting joke. Everyone knows how everyone will vote. Just do this thing.
BUT BUT YOUR PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES, I SAY! You know what my main principle is? I don’t give in to threats. I’m done with this pretending that this is about anything other than pure power plays. In the era of the Golden Scalp Weasel came the Great Unmasking.
Since the masks are off, let me take off mine. I am, underneath it all, an utterly cold blooded pragmatist. I loathe to my DNA that SCOTUS is now most powerful. But it is. That’s not changing. And thus I want that power to be on my side as much as possible.
If that means ramming a vote through as hard and fast as possible, so be it. So be it. I screamed my throat raw and typed my fingers bloody for decades telling everyone not to get to this point. I lost that argument. I lost that argument entirely. Will to power it is then.
I am, by the by, fully aware of what will happen when the roles are reversed. How can I not be? It’s been laid bare for years. I am doing my enemies, and it is clear now they are not opponents, the favor of taking them seriously. I’m just using the power they want first.
Since this is the game that will be played, play it we shall. And play it to win.
A hearty a-friggin’-MEN to every single word. I have but one caveat: Team Liberty should not consider for one moment leaving ANY tactic, weapon, or dirty trick off the table or out of bounds in this war—a principle which applies both to the SCOTUS skirmish specifically and to the wider war. For war it most certainly is; like it or not, there is no longer any shying from it. Frankly, I doubt there ever really was. There is but one way forward for us now: straight the fuck through their asses.
No, we didn’t want war; we didn’t want any of this. But it has been pressed upon us nonetheless, by a dead-serious, committed, and truly dangerous enemy that has only been emboldened by our reluctance to engage them—that being a product not of cowardice or weakness as our enemies delude themselves, but of nothing more than basic human decency and sanity.
And if there’s one lesson we all ought to have gleaned from so many decades of futile, bootless “police actions,” “liberations,” and “nation building,” then it’s a simple one, and here t’is: if it’s war we must wage, then we must fight to win. MUST. Our guiding ethic in this can only be war to the knife, knife to the hilt. No holds barred, no quarter asked or given, no stopping or easing off until our enemies are well and truly vanquished.
When the dust has settled, they must know that they’ve been kissed, as the old saying goes. Should there be the slightest question about that after all is said and done, then we didn’t do it correctly…and will only have to repeat the whole dismal process all over again, until we finally get it right. Which is something we really, REALLY don’t want.
It’s looking like we are at the very beginning of CW2.
No quarter.