Tonight, George W. Bush announces his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. Tonight also marks the start of FUD-flinging season.

What a coinkidink!

Professional FUD-flingers, such as Mr. Bush, Karl Rove, and many in the Republican party and in the media, will converge on Washington, the birthplace of FUD-flinging, in an all-out attempt to declarify and obfuscate the history and politcal leanings of Mr. Bush’s nominee, all the while attempting to convince everyone that this is the biggest story around, and not, say, the Karl-Rove-leaked-a-covert-agent’s-identity story, you know, for example.

Let’s see how the media covers the action….

Supreme
adjective
• very great or intense; extreme

Court
verb [ trans. ]
• pay special attention to (someone) in an attempt to win their support or favor

• go to great lengths to win (favorable attention)

- New Oxford English Dictionary

What, you’ve never heard these definitions before? It’s what George W. Bush has been doing for most of his political career, and what you can expect him to do when selecting a candidate to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Conner on the United States Supreme Court.

His “base”, those generally wealthy, generally White, generally conservative, generally Christian individuals to whom he generally caters, want someone on the Court who will, among other things, remove the rights of a woman to control her own body, support the imprisonment of American citizens with no access to a lawyer, and agree to continued invasions of personal privacy.

George W. Bush is indebted to this base: they were instrumental in getting him elected, after that long period of courting them, and now they want payback, and you can bet that will come in the form of a candidate who will support their conservative agenda.

This, of course, will be devastating to this country, as the Court already is rather conservative, with O’Conner being the so-called “swing vote”. Replacing O’Conner with a conservative will tip the precarious balance of a supposedly non-partisan deliberative body far enough to the right that it might take decades to reverse the decisions the new Court puts forth, assuming we continue to have the opportunity to do that.

Now is the time to make your voices heard. The choices Bush makes for the Supreme Court (and there will be another, you can be sure of that) will affect our lives for a generation or more, and might forever change the course of this country. Do we want to return to a time where women had to undergo dangerous back alley “medical procedures”? Do we want to live in a country where being a citizen has no meaning, and the right to privacy doesn’t exist?

Stand up. Fight any Bush nominations who make judicial decisions based ideological believes rather than Constitutional convictions.