Conservative Bumfight:
The latent pleasures of the Bumfight videos have never revealed themselves to the Rude Pundit. The choppily-edited scenes of homeless men and/or crackheads paid to beat the living shit out of each other, with its moments of public shitting, rotten teeth pulling, and more, has always seemed a bit too esoteric, an audience limited to assholes and wimpy asshole-wannabes (those skeevy fuckers who hang around assholes hoping some of that backward ball cap glory can be their own but who secretly either despise the asshole or want to fuck the asshole or both). Maybe it's the blatant exploitation. Maybe it's the idea of seeing it on DVD in the comfort of your frat house instead of pulling up a bar stool to see it live.

For, surely, there's fun to be had from watching a good brawl, where verminous cretins, filled with alcohol and hubris, just need something to spark them to crazed bouts of mindless violence. Like a soccer match. Or the nomination to the Supreme Court of someone who isn't obviously bugfuck insane fundamentalist Christian right wing nutzoid.

'Cause, even though, and, c'mon, the chances of Harriet Miers being some lefty who's been playin' rope-a-dope with George W. Bush since the 1990s are about the same as Donald Rumsfeld admitting an error, it's a blast to watch conservatives go ballistic that Bush didn't nominate Johnny Fuckyerrights, a Pepperdine-educated ideologue who has personally beaten a "confession" out of a "terrorist" and then shoved aborted fetuses back into wombs after chainsawing down an old growth forest just to make a single copy of a book on intelligent design that can be sold by Halliburton at a thousand-fold mark-up to poor school districts forced by law to teach it. And, what the fuck, he's black.

Here's the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru (which, strangely, is also the name of the Rude Pundit's favorite Sri Lankan dish) on CNN's Newsnight last night: "I think it's a missed opportunity for the president to nominate somebody and get them confirmed who's a solid conservative with a track record and a known quantity, who has given us some evidence that she's thought seriously about the role of the judiciary in our society." Ponnuru (which is also the Rude Pundit's favorite Kama Sutra position) said that, as William Kristol commented, conservatives are "demoralized."

And then Ponnuru joined the party liberals have been having for about, let's say, four and a half years now: "[T]he argument that the administration making is, this was a good decision because the president made it and the president makes good decisions. And that might be enough for a monarchy, but it's plainly not a persuasive argument in a democratic system." Which used to be called "questioning a President at a time of war" or "treasonous" or some such shit when it was the rest of us who asked Bush to actually persuade us that he's right. Hey, National Review, welcome back to America - now why don't you help clean up the fuckin' mess you made?

There's little Dickie Viguerie, who's been polluting the pool since at least the Goldwater era, and has finally said what many real and actual conservatives (those of that old school but still evil variety) have been saying: that George Bush could give a shit less about conservative "values": "President Bush desperately needed to have an ideological fight with the Left to redefine himself and re-energize his political base, which is in shock and dismay over his big government policies."

Yeah, it's a fun time here, watching the conservative bumfight, with Rich Lowry smashing a chair over Orrin Hatch's head, with Pat Buchanan forcing Ken Mehlman's face into a pile of shit. The right has had a hard-on for the big ideological battle for years, thinking that this time, this Supreme Court nominee would be it. But then, inconveniently, with DeLay slamming into a brick wall called "indictment," with the Iraq war making Bush's every utterance a lie to the general public, with Plamegate potentially blowing up, the right is reacting like it's got blue balls once again, screaming at anyone who'll listen that it's time for sprays of conservative jizz to despoil the body politic.

But don't worry, sweet conservatives. Harriet Miers will turn out to be the good little toady you need her to be. You may have lost faith in George Bush's ability to make decisions, but the Rude Pundit has not.

Later today: The Rude Pundit quotes his hate mail.