Via Sullivan, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, of all places:

Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.

Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?

Well, they’re absolutely gaining the attention of people who aren’t on their side - just not in a good way.

Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left (”Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!”) are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged.

‘Round here we use the term OUTRAGE!!!

Republicans can be liberated by the fact that they’re outnumbered and likely about to lose. They can step back, breathe in, and use the Sotomayor confirmation hearings to perform a public service: Find out what the future justice thinks and why she thinks it, explain what they think and why they think it, look at the two different philosophies, if that’s what they are. Don’t make it sparring, make it thinking.

Um, Peggy, we’re talking about Sean Hannity’s fans here. I agree that the Republican Party would have a broader appeal to people like me if in fact this was the approach it took (and the biggest reason for my hostility toward the party is because it so rarely takes this approach, due to the inherent hostility and anti-intellectualism of the knee-jerk “base”).

And in the end, any Republican Senator who does take this tack (and only this tack) will be absolutely pilloried by the base as Neville Chamberlain, defeatist, insuffiently pugnacious to carry the GOP standard. Ultimately - and the Sotomayor pick throws this into stark relief - the party either surrenders unconditionally to the base, or it - very publicly, and thus permanently - repudiates the base.

Can’t do either.

Checkmate.