The "good" Republican

Are you ever so taken with a post, and with your own comment to the post, that you decide just to send the whole thing over to your own blog? That's what I'm doing here. Scott D, at Scott's Conservative News and Commentary, has a nice post about Alito's nomination. I especially appreciated the first paragraph:

President Bush made the only play available to him when he nominated Samuel Alito for the final Supreme Court vacancy. He learned quickly with the Harriet Miers fiasco that elections do indeed have consequences. It really is quite irrelevant what the liberals think about his decision-making, because they steadfastly refuse to accept any decision the President makes. He nominated Harriet Miers, whom we know now Senate Minority leader Harry Reid highly recommended on his wish-list to the President, and liberals went nuts over Ms. Miers conservative credentials--whatever those credentials were. On the other side, many conservatives felt betrayed by the Presidents' selection. End result of "compromise" choice: complete failure. [Emphasis mine.]

I was struck by Scott's point about liberals going crazy over their perception of Miers' conservative credentials. With my usual gnat like ability to bounce from one subject to another, I riffed off of that, and started thinking about liberal dreamworlds. But let me back up.... One of the last hangovers of my liberal life (and something that's still part of Mr. Bookworm's liberal worldview) is the West Wing. As you may know, this season they're trying to portray a tight race between a "good" Republican and an almost saintly Democrat. They're problem, of course, is that the West Wing writers, all of whom hail from the liberal side of the spectrum, can't really acknowledge the possibility that there can be such a thing as a "good" Republican. (Kind of like a mouse trying to envision a "good" cat.) The best the writers can do, therefore, is to give the ostensibly Republican candiate Democrat attributes, and then attach the Republican label to him. So, by watching the West Wing we can figure out exactly what type of Republican would satisfy the Democrats in Congress: he's pro-choice, secular, and hostile to the Religious Right. In otherwords, he's a RINO.