is losing the new winning?

The blogosphere is full of postmortems on the Alito fight today (OK, some are from last night), and, guess what, we on the left won!

No, not really.

This one hurts, and it will hurt for a good long time (like the rest of Sam Alito’s natural life). I expect the new Supremos will do great harm to our rights and freedoms, our environment, our system of checks and balances, and our ability to correct these wrongs in the future. In no uncertain terms, this was a loss.

That said, if anyone were to tell you two weeks ago that 25 Senators were actually going to oppose cloture, that one of them would be a member of “the gang of 14,” that several prominent Democrats would be forced to switch sides and support the filibuster, and that all of this would be driven by a massive phone/fax/blog-a-thon, well, I think you, I, we would have said, “good luck, Captain Sunshine.”

And, it is with this spirit of hopeful optimism that I will quote Bobby Kennedy—“Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control”—and point you to two good sum-ups: Digby (at Hullabaloo) and Jane (at firedoglake).

And, of course, those two folks, and a bunch of others, got me thinking, so here’s my big fat capitoilette postmortem.