Roberts, the ultimate rope-a-dope?

I happen to believe that Bush is pretty happy with Roberts, and that Roberts is exactly the kind of judge that Bush wants. Many, on both sides, think that Bush's next pick will be more conservative though. If this is true, then the Roberts hearings seem to me to have done as much as possible ensure that Bush could, if he wished, put in a very conservative judge. Watching the hearings last night with Equal Rights advocates, Women's advocates and others, they made it clear that they considered Roberts absolutely unacceptable. Apparently, if Roberts is confirmed within a week slavery will be reinstituted and all women will be demanded by law to be barefoot and pregnant. I exagerate a bit here, but not a whole lot. Roberts is obviously not a good enough judge for these groups. By and large, their reasoning for this is not from the fact that he is oppossed to their causes, but that their exists reason to doubt that he is committed to their cause as they would like. Now doesn't oppose him because he is anti-abortion, they oppose him because he has not been proven himself to be pro-abortion. A similar dynamic appears with the Equal Rights advocates. They have made it perfectly clear that the only judge they will support is an ideologue who agrees with them. A non-ideological and unbiased judge is just as bad, or apparently just as bad, in the eyes of these groups as someone who is an ideologue for the other side. So Roberts, who I think most Americans will be pretty impressed with, and find to be an unbiased and fair judge, is absolutely horrible. The fact that the next judge Bush nominates will also be 'absolutely horrible' in the eyes of these groups seems obvious as well. The practicle result of this, is that even if the next nominee is far worse than Roberts, these groups will have a hard time claiming that the next nominee is worse than Roberts. To the extent the public disagrees with their evaluation of Roberts, and I think it fair to say that a broad swath of the country will, they will tend to discount future negative evaluation of Judges by these groups. These groups are, in my opinion, debasing their moral currancy, which is the only power they have to affect public policy.