The last 4 days have not been kind to the Democrats. Thursday morning I wrote:

The Miers withdrawal sets the stage for a dramatic Bush comeback....

And then on Friday, "Fitzmas" turned into a complete bust for all the conspiracy theorists on the Left. David Brooks summed it up perfectly on Meet the Press:

What people want to know, is there a dark, malevolent conspiracy in the middle of the White House? Is there a cancer on the presidency, to use John Dean's phrase.  And I think what Fitzgerald showed, you know, he was in there for 22 months.  He had full cooperation from everybody.  And what he found was no criminal conspiracy to out a covert agent.  He indicted one person of perjury, which is serious.  But the White House has to be breathing a sigh of relief, and the American people have to know that the wave of hysteria, the wave of paranoia, the wave of charges and allegations about Karl Rove and everybody else so far is unsupported by the facts.  So what we have is a serious indictment of a senior government official, but we do not have a cancer on the presidency. 

Now, that's not what many in the press and of course what the Democrats want to hear, but the average Joe American out there knows Brooks is way closer to the truth than the conspiracy spinsters on the Left.

So that is the backdrop coming into this morning when President Bush uncorked Judge Alito. The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen wrote this about Judge Alito in November last year:

Known as "Scalito," or little Scalia, he is considered less blustering than the big guy, but liberals will undoubtedly balk at his abortion record. In 1991, he dissented from a decision to strike down Pennsylvania's spousal notification provision--a decision the Supreme Court later upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the decision that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade. What should be far more troubling to Senate Democrats, however, is Alito's 1996 dissent from a decision upholding the constitutionality of a federal law prohibiting the possession of machine guns. Applying the logic of the Constitution in Exile for all it's worth, Alito insisted that the private possession of machine guns was not an economic activity, and there was no empirical evidence that private gun possession increased violent crime in a way that substantially affected commerce--therefore, Congress has no right to regulate it. Alito's colleagues criticized him for requiring "Congress or the Executive to play Show and Tell with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute." His lack of deference to Congress is unsettling...... 

Their (the Democrats) best hope lies in a principled conservative judge as opposed to an activist eager to undermine Congress's power in the name of the Constitution in Exile. By this measure, Alito, Brown, Clement, or Garza may be worth a Senate fight.

Given that the Right essentially vetoed Harriet Miers, who was a much better bet to end up like O'Connor or Souter, as compared to Alito, who given his 15 year judicial record, is almost a guarantee to line up with Scalia and Thomas, there is no question that the Left will demand a full scale war. The problem is the Democrats simply don't have the votes to defeat Alito outright or the votes to prevent the detonation of the nuclear option if they were to attempt a filibuster.

Like I said, though you might not know it from the MSM coverage, it has been a very good four days for President Bush.