We may have finally perfected the political spin machine. Rather than the glory days of press secretaries and partisan hacks responding to events with canned statements and flustered mistruths, the cesspool that is Washington D.C. has mastered the art so well it anticipates the spin in advance.
And there’s no better example than the political left’s demagoguery in advance of today’s Supreme Court decision (stay tuned for that).
James Fallows suddenly thinks the Supreme Court is in the midst of a long term “coup” that conveniently began around the time of Bush v. Gore.
E.J. Dionne realized yesterday that Justice Antonin Scalia is so political he can’t possibly be a part of the Supreme Court.
Roger Simon is just a little overwrought, declaring the Supreme Court a body that “consists of nine people elected by nobody. They rule for life. Their power is absolute.”
And Ezra Klein now thinks the Supreme Court is as ideologically divided as it’s ever been.
These arguments are the height of partisan foolishness and historical revisionism. Of course there is a political element to the Supreme Court — without it, how would we have Roe v. Wade? But it’s only when defeat is anticipated that the left chooses to deem the court a broken institution.
And as deserved, this argument has been annihilated.
Yuval Levin laughs off the left’s sudden discovery of politics in the Supreme Court:
This debate is indeed a political debate, in the best and highest sense. But that does not make it a cynical debate, or an illegitimate one. On the contrary. The apparent inability of many left-wing commentators to see that point tells us more than all their diatribes in recent days. Their anger about the very possibility that the Court might disagree with them about Obamacare suggests that they do not believe that there can be such a thing as a serious political debate—they take serious and political to be opposites. And it shows.
Tim Carney, writing for the Washington Examiner, drives the nail home:
The truth is we’ve entered an era where many liberal commentators are willing to dismiss any argument as illegitimate just because they don’t like it.
Mark my words: if the SCOTUS upholds the law, these complainers will vanish into the woodwork. For the left, it’s only political if they lose.
