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With the 2006 elections ten months away Karl Rove pulled back the curtain on some key GOP campaign themes recently. Hidden amongst the themes of the Democrats' "pre-9/11 worldview" and tax cuts was his statement that Democrat Senators looked "mean spirited and small minded" during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings of Judge Sam Alito. After decades of allowing themselves to be branded the bullies of American politics, might Republicans now have an opportunity to turn the tables on their liberal adversaries, both in the other party and in the media?

It seems as though no matter how crazy the Democrats become, Republicans always wear the black hats. Even after countless "Bush is Hitler" parades in Washington, almost $300 million in liberal 527 negative advertising, and a phony memo scandal that almost brought down a whole network, the big story out of the 2004 election remains those nasty Swift Boat Veterans who "slandered" poor John Kerry, who simply was merely "reporting for duty."

Of course, being mean and nasty isn't necessarily a negative trait for a politician to have, given that lunatic Islamist terrorists are trying to kill us. But that point notwithstanding, I do believe it is time the Democrats start wearing the black hats in the popular caricature of our nation's political drama.

That Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee made fools of themselves regarding the Alito nomination is axiomatic. Their race-baiting berating of Judge Alito brought his wife to tears and caused her to walk away from the committee room in dismay and disgust.

Left-wing "activists" have launched an organized campaign to "graffiti-ize the covers" of popular new conservative books such as Kate O'Beirne's Women Who Make the World Worse and Fred Barnes's Rebel-in-Chief. For example, one subversive Photoshop expert replaced the title of Barnes's book with "Felon-in-Chief." Hardy-Har-har.

Even worse were some of the online "reviews." Here's one:

Bravo. It would be easy to blow this fringe lunacy off if it wasn't, more or less, the official Democrat Party line about our president.

And don't forget Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's reaction to left-wing reader "feedback" to her columns about Jack Abramoff:

Yes, we are dealing with a very nasty group here. But the Alito smears and the tasteless web chatter are small chips when we hold them up against liberal public policies. It is there that the liberals demonstrate just how mean and callous they really are.

CONSIDER THE SUBJECT OF EMBRYONIC stem cell research. In recent years, America's insurgents have assailed President Bush and Republicans for being "against science" because the administration's official policy holds that the United States should not use taxpayer dollars to finance the cloning and killing of human embryos for the purposes of conducting scientific experiments. It really shouldn't be that controversial a public policy. Just replace "embryos" with "people" and I imagine you'd approach something near unanimous consent in favor of discontinuing any such program.

But the radicals have been filling the hearts of the aged and infirm with false hope about "the promise" of embryonic stem cell research. As 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards argued at a campaign stop:

Elsewhere, 58 U.S. Senators -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- urged President Bush in a letter to reverse his position on federal funding for clone-to-kill programs in part because the United States was in danger of falling behind South Korea in realizing the miracles of embryonic stem cell research. Didn't he know that this research "might hold the key" to curing 100 million Americans, including former President Ronald Reagan (if Bush hadn't already killed him, that is)?!

Alas, it was all a lie. The appropriately named South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, upon whose shoulders all this "promise" rested, turned out to be as fraudulent as Mary Mapes's documents. He faked his cloned stem cell lines. And the enthusiasm for his work expressed by the "scientific community" has made a joke out of the concept of peer review.

Lest you think this is just some isolated hoax with no implications on the larger field of embryonic stem cell research, consider the words of one of Dr. Hwang's peers, Joseph Itskovitz: "The bottom line is that it's a major disaster to our whole field because the expectations were so high and now we are back to square one."

This is Jonas Salk faking the vaccination for polio. The hopes of 100 million Americans have been shattered because of the callousness of liberal promises.

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