Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
- from The Kraken, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
OK, I got the idea for the title from Jon Stewart's take on the Right's reaction to the nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. Watch it below. He is, as always, spot on. Any fan of fantasy and science-fiction films is familiar with The Kraken, a mythical beast of the sea sometimes physically depicted as a giant squid. The Right takes Kagan's nomination as an attack, directly hitting its "left" flank in the culture war.
But the Right seems confused in its counterattack: lesbian? no experience? anti-military? Harriet Miers? Intelligence? As Stewart put it: "She's a recordless entity with no paper trail."
The comparisons to Harriet Miers are, of course, ridiculous: Miers committed THE public relations suicide of the decade when she said of George Bush, "He's the most brilliant man I have ever met." So much for judgment. She also received her law degree at Pat Robertson's Regent University, so you could pretty well determine the direction of her stances, especially concerning gay rights. Anyway, after her fifteen minutes, she was put back in her cage for two years, during which she was constantly pressured by Johua Bolton to resign. She now works for the Dallas law firm known as Locke Lord Bissell Lamp, Liddell.
Any comparisons come from desperate Right wingnuts or people who get their news from Fox.
We Fear What We Don't Know
