This is the fundamental thing about a lot of right wing people I don't understand. Just because you have a certain ideological bent why is it necessary to believe all the lies some people on that side put out? You see this over and over again, and it is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.

The whole idea of a political party is to use ideology and reason to create a consistent policy to benefit a constituency. This usually works out with two sides to every story, two parties, two ideologies so they negotiate some kind of compromise that people overall can accept.

The most common reaction people on the left have now is wondering whether the RNC is sending pills to all its members they have to take every week. This is no partisan tactic, the whole conept of truth and reason seems to have become unpatriotic and against Republican principles.

If you read up on the recount this is yet another example of this delusional approach. Law is not some sort of partisan game or alternative reality, there are clear things that judges have to do to behave in an ethical manner. One party didn't make that up, this has been a tradition for centuries. Dershowitz and Bugliosi explain it all quite clearly in their books. These aren't partisan points, they define what a judge is.

A judge is restricted to do certain things, for example they are not allowed to ethically favor one party over another (the shoe on the other foot test). They also have to follow precendent and their previous decisions and show where the thinking hasn't changed for some convenient end.

The whole point of the decision and the virtually unanomous consensus of law professors is that they did not do this. Their decision was unjustified according to law and precedent, and can only be contrued as failing the shoe on the other foot test. That's what that issue is about, it's about whether they acted ethically or not. The dissenting opinions also make clear they didn't.

There was no serious discussion on this between left and right wing lawyers. Barely any right wing lawyers had the gall to even attempt to defend it. The legal opinions were all virtually unanomous that the decision they made was unsupportable by any legal or ethical argument.

But some people on the right try to fudge this issue which always astonishes me. The legal and political process is not supposed to be a haven of crooks, it prospers because each side has to be willing to police its own. It doesn't make someone a bad Republican because they fail to support crooked judges and I am frankly amazed that anyone would think so.

As to the rest of the recount debate this issue encapsulates the problem. Reality shows the Supreme Court made a corrupt decision. One can argue Bush might have won anyway but that is no defense to corruption. In fact he wouldn't have won if the standard remedy of discerning the intent of the voter by counting all over and under votes was applied anyway.

So if the whole debate has become so delusional about this clear legal point then how can people fix these problems properly?