Back to the '60s Barricades.(Geopolitics: Diplomacy is the police in grand costume--Napoleon)(Samuel Alito confirmation hearings)

On matters of national security, Democrats are back on their 1960s barricades. For them, the chief dangers to the United States lie not abroad but at home, within our own government--specifically unaccountable law enforcement, military, and national security establishments. This near paranoia was clear as Democratic senators grilled Samuel Alito during his confirmation hearings about wiretaps and the supposed evaporation of American freedom.

Ironically, the Italians reported at just about the same time that their own similar electronic surveillance had smashed an Islamist plot to repeat September 11 on a grander scale. The ossified Democratic view just can't fathom the very notion that liberal Europeans might do even more wiretapping than John Ashcroft, and save many innocent lives in the process.

The Judiciary Committee examination of Judge Alito also proved to be a televised circus that embarrassed Democratic stalwarts like Senators Biden, Durbin, Feinstein, Leahy, and Kennedy across the board.

No one doubts Judge Alito's judicial qualifications. And few believe he's any further from the "mainstream" than Justices Breyer or Ginsburg, whose clear liberal credentials didn't stop the vast majority of Republicans from confirming both. Instead, the venom over Alito arose from the growing importance of the Supreme Court as a lifeboat to a Democratic establishment that is adrift.

Doctrinaire Blue-state liberalism can't quite win a national majority any more, so liberals now look to the courts as a last bastion to promote unexamined "progressive" thought. Federal and state justices with lifetime appointments are shielded from the realities faced by most Americans. And for decades these utopians have overturned plebiscites, the will of state legislatures, and federal laws to enact social goals otherwise not supported by voters or embraced by most politicians up for election.

True, judicial activism was partly sparked by the past failure of elected leaders to enact civil rights and equal protection for the poor. But decades later, the goodwill flowing from these achievements has dissipated. Instead of offering a new agenda that reflects the developing national mood and the realities of enormous social progress, ...