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Feinstein’s criterion for confirming a justice
Dianne Feinstein has always struck me as the ultimate nanny-state politician, mainly because she frames political issues in therapeutic language, and even sounds like a therapist, or perhaps a nursery school teacher. In the latest example of this disconcerting tendency, Feinstein announced she will vote against John Roberts’s nomination to be chief justice because she had wanted to hear him “talking to me as a son, a husband and a father.” On second thought, however, does not Feinstein’s demand for personal revelation reflect—even if in a distorted and silly way—a legitimate concern? Is she not reacting against the same thing in Roberts that I have criticized, his profile as a mere man of procedure, a Beltway operator, a legal technician—in short, his lack of three-dimensional substance? We all laughed in contempt at the pony-tailed guy at the 1992 presidental debate between Bush the Elder and Clinton who referred to the president as our symbolic daddy figure. But underneath the therapy-speak and leftist alienation, is there not a genuine, frustrated desire—the true nature of which the left itself does not recognize—for genuine authority, real leaders, real men?
In short, is not the left unconsciously longing for the very principle of truth and order that they have overthrown—whether it be God, or objective morality, or their country, or their actual fathers? Email entry |