Cloture passed

As we predicted on Thursday, the proposed filibuster has been defeated. The numbers were 72-25 in favor of cloture: only twenty-five Democrats joined the unrealistic and hopelessly negativistic bandwagon pushed by radical activists at dailykos.com and elsewhere. Alito is going to be confirmed tomorrow.

The main "kos" from dailykos.com celebrates the fact that despite the vote that they have lost, they were able to send a huge number of obnoxious e-mails and organize lots of telephone calls and threaten, terrorize, and annoy virtually every Democratic as well as Republican lawmaker and everyone else who matters. The main "kos" believes that this fact is great. On the other hand, your humble correspondent thinks that these people should be deeply ashamed for their behavior.

Such an approach resembles asymmetric wars - typical strategies that are followed by the terrorists and others - but it is not a good attitude to influence events in a democratic system because the amount of terror that the Democratic lawmakers had to face will definitely be counted as a huge minus for the Democratic Party in the 2006 elections.

By the way, it is not just dailykos.com that is producing tons of hatred and insane threats. PZ Myers has listed all the reasonable Democratic lawmakers and associated them with various disgusting animals. Others plan to write additional nasty letters. They think that they have the right to be furious and "hold them accountable". Others are already buying rifles and cheap ammunition. Hundreds of other reactions are here.

Radical leftwingers are dangerous; they have always been dangerous. Incidentally, dailykos.com must have a special black list of hosts and domains. When I try to open dailykos.com from the Harvard computers, I get a "404 Not Found" error. ;-) Of course, I can open it in hundreds of other ways...