Even Richard Cohen Pans Harriet Miers

....in a round-about way. What interested me, aside from the spectacle of a hard-left Extreme Media pundit publicly admitting that Roe v. Wade has been a disaster for our political culture and the integrity of the judiciary (if not also acknowledging the real drag it's been for over forty million kids who never got to see the other end of the birth canal), was the impactful way that Cap'n Ed connected the dots:

In the midst of the Harriet Miers pas de deux, and even the John Roberts confirmation dance, Cohen's column begs the question: if a liberal columnist like Cohen can easily kick out the rotting intellectual struts of Roe in the opinion pages of the Washington Post, why can't a Republican President nominate a Supreme Court justice who can do the same thing for a Republican Senate?...

If the present Administration had the courage that Cohen had when he wrote this article, then we could have had this debate starting on November 7th in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. We could have seen just how mainstream originalism is when explained to the American people in plain language and how it benefits people across the entire political spectrum, not just conservatives on one particular legal issue. We would have had the chance to turn around decades of judicial hijacking of our political system had a Janice Rogers Brown or Michael Luttig been the nominee.

Instead, we will have Harriet Miers avoiding any expression of her politics and dodging and weaving through yet another meaningless exercise.

A tragically missed opportunity, or was George W. Bush setting us up all along? Any way you want to slice it, one thing seems inescapable regardless: Dubya's courage stops at the water's edge - heading inland.

And ditto his common sense.