After the election last week, which was rather surprising in some ways (advantage: netroots) and quite shocking in others, we found the bobbleheads of the parrot-Media relentlessly took up Republican talking points that the voters in America didn’t really vote against Mr Bu$h’s personal illegal war of aggression but rather voted against Republicans and for Democrats (mind your step – bump in the road ahead) because they wanted to send the message that the Republican plan for bipartisanship is the method of governance they prefer!

Yes, really. So it seems.

After proclaiming that he was loyally asking for bipartisanship and looked forward to working with the new (Democratic – not Democrat, you ninny) leadership, Mr Bu$h exercised some of that bipartisanship he is world-famous for.

After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has not received the nominations yet. As word spread about the nominations, however, the committee’s Republican Chairman Arlen Specter told reporters: “It is obvious they cannot move during the lame-duck session.” After January, he added, questions about the fate of the nominees should be “directed to someone else.”

Quick note: since Senator Arlen Specter, who never saw a fascist law he didn’t get a woodie over, says there is no chance on these law chumps, who have been rejected at least once, if not twice by a Republican Congress, we should prepare ourselves for Darlin Arlen’s announcement on Friday of a new bill he is introducing on Saturday to amend the Constitution so as to allow judges nominated by a President to be approved, without Judiciary Committee approval, by voice vote at 3:00 in the morning.

Lawmakers and others had been waiting to see whether Bush would renominate four particularly controversial appeals court candidates whose nominations had expired without Senate action. He did. The four include two nominees to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond: Terrence Boyle, a district court judge in North Carolina and a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, and Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, who became a symbol of the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism, interrogations and other wartime powers. In addition, William Myers, a lobbyist and critic of environmental rules, was renominated for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and Michael Wallace of Mississippi, rated unqualified for the appeals court by an American Bar Association panel, was renominated for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

Two quick notes: An expired nomination is in fact a denied recommendation by the Judiciary Committee, because, let’s face it, the R’s still own Congress. They could have gotten these chumps onto the bench in two days if they weren’t afraid of them. The above quotes come from Washington Wire which is published by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ does pretty good news even though the editorial page looks like it was teleported in from some other dimension in a far distant galaxy.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall has a similar take on this view, with a cynical but not surprising twist:

Empty gestures intended to placate an angry base. Another reminder of what a weakened White House looks like.