Arguments for and against filibuster

We've had a lot of posts here about the filibuster in the past few days, and primarily they have been pro-filibuster action item focused. Tonight I want to share one of the links that takes the "anti" stance, a post from John at AMERICAblog entitled Why I Oppose the Filibuster. He gives a number of reasons, but here's one that might resonate for a lot of people here. POsting it without any comment of my own--just putting it out there.

John Kerry is using you.
A leader who uses you for his own personal gain - who plays on your understandable angst and tricks you into supporting a filibuster with no plan whatsoever for victory, who has no plan to win the war of public opinion regardless of the outcome of the vote, who simply is doing this because he wants to win the Netroots' support for his 2008 presidential campaign, to hell with how much it hurts the very goals that Netroots wants to achieve - is no leader in my book.

On the other side of the argument, we have this analysis from Atrios:

Cruising into Tuesday evening next week there will be two possible storylines:

1) The Democrats are a bunch of losers, as are all of their supporters. Bush and his giant codpiece looked magnificent at the state of the union, and Mrs. Alito was very happy and smiling sitting next to Mrs. Bush safe and content now that the magnificent and mighty President Bush made that bad Ted Kennedy go away.

2) The Democrats shocked Washington today by holding together, dropping a mighty turd in the punchbowl of the Bush administration, dealing a deadly blow to his nomination of Alito. The president won't be too happy tonight as he gives the 2006 state of the union speech.


Those are the choices.

Oh man--I've gotta tell you that this is a *big* driving force behind my desire to see a filibuster. You *know* that this timing can't be an accident. Bush wants to go into his reading of the State of the Union address with the freshly achieved victory of an Alito nomination adding swagger to his step. I want to see him (metaphorically, got that, NSA?) kicked in the shins so that he is not swaggering but *limping* up to that podium.

Anyway...thoughts on all of this?

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