Internet Rules

The Miers denouement shows the power of the new media.

John Fund of The Wall Street Journal sums up the fight over Harriet Miers in the context of the development of new media. And indeed, the new media is where such intellectual skirmishes will be fought for the foreseeable future. For the Internet allows people on all sides of the debate to talk to each other and to process the various arguments in favor, or against, any given idea or position one can name. In this case we saw an internal debate on the conservative side over the qualifications and future implication of the Miers nomination. And in the end the skeptics formed the majority with defenders being few and far between. In this particular battle of ideas it was the skeptics who were on solid ground with the defenders putting up various weak arguments that were quickly refuted. And it should not have surprised the defenders that the critics held to the positions that they did. For this particular nomination, and the next one to come, will be critical in turning the country away from the left's version of court ordered socialism and back to the democratic-capitalist republic that it was originally intended to be.

In the next battle we will see conservatives defending the new nominee, Sam Alito, against the attacks from the Angry Left. It should be very interesting to say the least. And conservatives have been waiting for this fight for some time. Americans are coming to understand that the courts have taken much of the job of legislatures to themselves in a manner which would have disturbed the founding fathers greatly. The motivation of conservatives in this fights is to bring the court back to where it was originally designed to be in the context of American government; as an impartial arbiter rather than as a super-legislature that cannot be un-elected. The Angry Left will fight this with all their might because they have nothing left and more importantly because they know that they cannot advance the Great Socialist Utopia at the ballot box. Only through the courts have they been able to put their programs into action. And courts, unlike legislatures, are very difficult to reverse. Thus the left has a vested interest in keeping the courts beyond the reach of the influence of the vast majority of Americans