Posted 4:55 PM by Gene

People may chuckle knowingly of the senators' gaseousness during the Scalito hearings, but we don't: they show a culture with senile dementia, and its leaders in the advanced stages. There is no shame in asking tough questions of a judge whose politics you disagree with, and there is no shame in lauding a judge because you agree with him; but senators are so obesely contented they cannot see the anorexia in their brains. Carrying sloganeering and ad hominem attcks and club-footed flattery to their limits, they pontificated so broadly and irrelevantly as to confirm their own uselessness, even while complaining in the typical third-person manner of the unfairness of their predicament. Had we an imagination we could have pictured them in the bitter end of the Roman Empire, with spinachy garlands and gold-cloth togas and armies of concubines and slaves, but for their intellectual raiment beneath the late Robert Hall. We are not served by a one-party state, but we can scarcely be served any worse by a two-party state of shakedown artists and demagoguing ignoramuses.