I had this whole other post I'd been working on for a few days about how much I have come to dread judicial confirmations and how the increasing toxic dysfunctionality of the had become instituitonalized.  The well-heeled wingnuts have set up all these little P.R. campaigns disguised as think tanks with benignly deceptive names--"Center for Justice," "Judicial Confirmation Goodness Association," "Totally Not Some Rabid Oppo Weasels and One Loutish Flack Pretending to be a Serious Think Tank" whose sole purpose is to pump poison into our discourse, with the eager cooperation of the cable nets. 

For a while, everything was going as I, and they, had expected.  Pre-announcment message coordination conference calls ensured that everyone blasted out the same talking points.  The short list dossiers were dusted off and fine tuned while the front people yakked up the generic denunciations and then an agreed upon attack specific to the nominee was launched based on positively Orwellian misrepresentions of the nominees opinions, the role of the courts, and the characterization of straghtforward applications of precedent to facts as "judicial activism." And, of course, the mass mailing of fund raising letters threatening the imminent end of all that is good and decent unless the recipient digs in to their pocket right now--which are, of course, the whole point of the carefully choreographed danse macabre that Supreme Court confirmations have degenerated into--went out right on schedule. 

And then, right before our bemused eyes, the weirdest thing happened.  Almost every man in their ensesmble cast went off scipt and started ad libbing an entirely different performance than the one they had planned.   

Initially, they had all seemingly agreed that Obama's choice of Sotomayor was politically brilliant because it put the Republicans in a position where they had to tread very carefully on questions of ethnicity and gender. But by the end of the week, that was all they could talk about and they could only talk about it in the most loutish, inflammatory, fashion possible. 

It started with a weird remark here and there there, oddly little discordant deviations the agreed upon attack on "Obama's lawless empathy standard" which was supposed to oh-so-subtly and covertly whip up the incipient Bubba-fear that is the right's new financial mainstay. But it was like they couldn't help themselves.  Suddenly, it looked very much like that the white men who were supposed to be cynically stoking a silly fear among less well educated and socially advanced white males were themselves gripped by that fear.  It was as if the image of our African-American president appointing a woman of Puerto Rican discent to the nation's highest court had lanced some carbuncle of hysterical fear deep in their souls and the festering pus came exploding out of them and onto the T.V. screens.