The Incredible Shrinking Double-H
If there is a bigger casualty of the misbegotten Harriet Miers nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court outside the Bush Administration than Hugh Hewitt, I don't know who it would be.
I suppose it isn't really all that earth-shaking. Hugh's reputation as an unshakable GOP, and especially Bush, cheerleader, oftentimes in blatant defiance of reality, is well known. For instance, he was about the only Pachyderm in the country who thought that the President won the first debate with John Kerry a year and twelve days ago. He was a big backer of "Snarlin' Arlen" Specter in his primary battle royal with conservative GOP challenger Pat Toomey (as was Bush) and equally as vehement in his insistence after the election that Specter get the Judiciary Committee chairmanship despite the negative implications for the President's (at the time) constitutionalist judicial nominees. Indeed, he warned of dire consequences to the Senate majority caucus if the RINO Specter wasn't placated. He wasn't even all that put out by the McCain mutiny and its "memo of understanding" that gave effective GOP blessing to the Democrats' extraconstitutional filibuster tactic.
With that backdrop, it becomes fairly predictable that the man who was beating the drums for Judges Luttig and McConnell louder than anybody - no stealth nominees they - would backflip on a dime and thump the tub for the ultimate mystery meat pick in Harriet Miers with even greater gusto.
What is combusting Hugh's credibility, to the point of rendering his radio program and blog almost unbearable, is the gag-inducing lengths to which he is going to try and prop up a nomination whose wheels have already burst all their PR lugnuts.
Anybody following the Miers kerfuffle and regular surfers of the center-right blogosphere are aware of the internecine war that has ignited between Hewitt and the Corner. And while Double-H is one man while the Corner is many, and ordinarily Hewitt, as the generally acknowledged "Blogfather," can hold his own in most any handicap match, in this one he's getting his buns drawn & quartered, as evinced by the left-wing tactics to which he is stooping.
Case in point:
With all due respect to Ramesh Ponnuru, it's not beyond me. Hugh's point is that party comes before ideology. If Bush does something manifestly unconservative and completely at odds with what he promised in both his national campaigns, we in the grassroots are obligated to fall into line and support it anyway because Bush is our president and our leader. And any of us who don't are "disloyal" and traitors to the cause - that cause being the personal success of the President and nothing else. Really, it's not all that different in form, if perhaps not yet in degree, from the Democrats' penchant for putting party before just about everything else, including national security. And the Donks haven't enjoyed much electoral success with that mindset.
When one's loyalty isn't to a set of core beliefs but to one man (or woman), rationality and persuasion tend to go out the window, which helps explain the Bushies' descent into accusations of "elitism" and "sexism" against their erstwhile core supporters, and how Hewitt and his handful of Kool-Aid drinkers are following that dishonorable lead:
Again, if I may lend Jonah a hand, I think I can supply an answer to his question: the Miersians are grabbing at any insult available to throw at fellow conservatives because they have no substantive arguments to make in favor of the Miers nomination beyond parroting the President's "trust me" dodge. Since their rationale for supporting the White House is personal rather than substantive, they almost inevitably look upon opposition to Miers through the lens of loyalty to Bush rather than the merits (or lack thereof) of his nominee. And as such, they (and particularly Hugh Hewitt) are really doing their man no favors by becoming little more than sycophantic shills whose devotion only serves to wall the President off from seeing the bigger picture and recognizing his error instead of reinforcing it.
This is not to say that Hewitt isn't trying to rise above Kos-like potshots (and second-hand ones at that). But his attempts at reasonable persuasion border on the convergence of pathos, absurdity, and the bizarre:
Of course it's inconvenient - because he has no serious answer to it. The best he can do is that lame "she took the lottery job with the aim of improving it" retort. He has to realize that her heading a state-sponsored gambling concern undermines her evangelical credentials (Sure, Jesus went to where the harlots and tax-collectors were, but he didn't join their "professions" in order to try and reach them...), including the very Christian voices recruited and cultivated to flack for her candidacy. Consequently, obfuscation is his only alternative.
And as we can see, once Hewitt starts obfuscating, it quickly morphs into galloping fantasizing:
This, of course, dovetails with Hewitt's elsewhere description of evangelicals as "a diverse group with varied opinions," which is apparently inconvenient to deploy in this instance, prompting a dizzying whipsaw into monolithic "identity politics," as J-Pod further elaborates today:
And, as such, a vast, grave, and patronizing insult to the very evangelicals on whose behalf Double-H presumes to speak. Speaking as an evangelical I find the whole "support Miers, she's a Christian" angle to be an insult. It's disgustingly similar to how the Democrats treat their ethnic minority constituencies, an exercise in group-think that not only discourages individuality of thought but actively stigmatizes it in service to the collective[ist?] political good, definition and conduct of which always rests in the hands of elected party leaders. Sorry, Hugh, but if I wanted to be treated like the political equivalent of a Borg drone, I'd go join the real collective
Podhoretz sublimely calls Hewitt's empty fearmongering for precisely what it is:
The fact of the matter, taken straight from recent political history, is that the GOP base stays home when it perceives that its elected leaders have run away from them and the agenda they elected them to pursue. It happened in 1990 and 1992 after Bush41 shafted the base by raising taxes after solemnly promising before the '88 GOP convention and the nation at large not to. It happened in 1998 after elected Republicans fled the Clinton impeachment question in droves. It happened on the Senate side in 2000 after Senate 'Pubbies failed to even take Clinton's trial seriously.
By contrast, when the base and GOP candidates are on the same page, as in 1994, 2002, and last year, the former turns out in droves and victory has always been forthcoming.
What Hugh Hewitt and the "loyalist crowd" are forgetting is that we didn't work for the election and reelection of George Bush, and the expansion of the GOP senate majority, as mere ends in themselves. We did so in order to see an agenda pursued and, hopefully, advanced. Reconstitutionalizing the federal judiciary in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, topped that agenda. And now, with the opportunity to regain lost Olympian ground finally at hand, Bush punted instead. This is a betrayal, plain and simple, and one that no amount of hand-waving, excuse-making, or name-calling is going to mitigate.
The fault ultimately belongs to the president for blundering ahead with the Miers pick absent any vetting or reading of the political tea leaves, and stubbornly sticking with it despite the growing signs of its imperilment and ultimate doom and the critical damage doing so is doing to his presidenial viability and, yes, dimming Republican prospects for 2006. But Hugh Hewitt is not exactly covering himself in glory for his inexplicable efforts on Bush's, and Miers', behalf.
It's perhaps fitting that GDub and Double-H are so much alike in this sense. It makes the respective professional fates toward which each is plummeting that much more fitting - and that much sadder as well.
I suppose it isn't really all that earth-shaking. Hugh's reputation as an unshakable GOP, and especially Bush, cheerleader, oftentimes in blatant defiance of reality, is well known. For instance, he was about the only Pachyderm in the country who thought that the President won the first debate with John Kerry a year and twelve days ago. He was a big backer of "Snarlin' Arlen" Specter in his primary battle royal with conservative GOP challenger Pat Toomey (as was Bush) and equally as vehement in his insistence after the election that Specter get the Judiciary Committee chairmanship despite the negative implications for the President's (at the time) constitutionalist judicial nominees. Indeed, he warned of dire consequences to the Senate majority caucus if the RINO Specter wasn't placated. He wasn't even all that put out by the McCain mutiny and its "memo of understanding" that gave effective GOP blessing to the Democrats' extraconstitutional filibuster tactic.
With that backdrop, it becomes fairly predictable that the man who was beating the drums for Judges Luttig and McConnell louder than anybody - no stealth nominees they - would backflip on a dime and thump the tub for the ultimate mystery meat pick in Harriet Miers with even greater gusto.
What is combusting Hugh's credibility, to the point of rendering his radio program and blog almost unbearable, is the gag-inducing lengths to which he is going to try and prop up a nomination whose wheels have already burst all their PR lugnuts.
Anybody following the Miers kerfuffle and regular surfers of the center-right blogosphere are aware of the internecine war that has ignited between Hewitt and the Corner. And while Double-H is one man while the Corner is many, and ordinarily Hewitt, as the generally acknowledged "Blogfather," can hold his own in most any handicap match, in this one he's getting his buns drawn & quartered, as evinced by the left-wing tactics to which he is stooping.
Case in point:
[Hewitt] has now taken to posting readers' letters to the Corner on his own site. Here's how the letter he has posted starts: "Mr. Hewitt, I'm become so frustrated with the folks at NRO that I sent them this letter to the editor. There is no reason to think they'll publish or post it. I'm looking for another outlet." Right: Because we never, ever post comments criticizing NRO! Never. Except when we do, and Hewitt takes it as evidence that the conservative masses are against us. [
The reader goes on to suggest that conservatives have a general tendency to express feelings of betrayal whenever the president does something they dislike, even when the president is merely doing something that he campaigned on. He mentions No Child Left Behind, immigration, and spending. It's a reasonable point - but it's also one that has been made about a thousand times on NRO. It is true that, to my knowledge, nobody here has said, as the reader does, that Bush "hasn't backed down from a single commitment" - since it isn't true. (He did, for example, say he would veto McCain-Feingold.) He writes, "Here's a 5 cent psychiatric assessment. Conservatives seem to be focused on Bush's alleged fiscal recklessness out of understandable guilt over not being more helpful in reforming Social Security." With the exception of the Wall Street Journal, NR did more than any other conservative voice in the media - certainly including Hewitt - to support Social Security reform. The letter writer ends by questioning whether conservative writers have any "honor" - a shabby, nasty charge he does next to nothing to support.
What point Hewitt thinks he is making by posting this note - other than that every publication gets silly letters to the editor - is beyond me. But then, I'm not in the business of making 5 cent psychiatric diagnoses.
With all due respect to Ramesh Ponnuru, it's not beyond me. Hugh's point is that party comes before ideology. If Bush does something manifestly unconservative and completely at odds with what he promised in both his national campaigns, we in the grassroots are obligated to fall into line and support it anyway because Bush is our president and our leader. And any of us who don't are "disloyal" and traitors to the cause - that cause being the personal success of the President and nothing else. Really, it's not all that different in form, if perhaps not yet in degree, from the Democrats' penchant for putting party before just about everything else, including national security. And the Donks haven't enjoyed much electoral success with that mindset.
When one's loyalty isn't to a set of core beliefs but to one man (or woman), rationality and persuasion tend to go out the window, which helps explain the Bushies' descent into accusations of "elitism" and "sexism" against their erstwhile core supporters, and how Hewitt and his handful of Kool-Aid drinkers are following that dishonorable lead:
What [Jonah Goldberg is] objecting to is the argumentation used in the intra-conservative conversation about Miers. There's no evidence that NR is anti-evangelical. There's no evidence anywhere that any conservative's principled objection to Miers is based on sexism (we would have done cartwheels for any one of several other women had been picked). Indeed, Kate's made a very strong case that the real sexism lies in the insinuation that Miers won't "grow" on the bench because she's Bush's loyal gal Friday. It seems to me you could argue that the loyalists are demonstrating their loyalty-above-all approach when they claim that criticism of the President is automatically an example of bad faith which in turn justifies them piling even more bad faith on top. Last I checked, Hugh Hewitt didn't personally pick Harriet Miers. So why he or his fans should take it as a personal affront if I call her a crony is beyond me. And why that would justify the loyalist crowd in grabbing at any insult available to throw at fellow conservatives is also beyond me. [emphasis added]
Again, if I may lend Jonah a hand, I think I can supply an answer to his question: the Miersians are grabbing at any insult available to throw at fellow conservatives because they have no substantive arguments to make in favor of the Miers nomination beyond parroting the President's "trust me" dodge. Since their rationale for supporting the White House is personal rather than substantive, they almost inevitably look upon opposition to Miers through the lens of loyalty to Bush rather than the merits (or lack thereof) of his nominee. And as such, they (and particularly Hugh Hewitt) are really doing their man no favors by becoming little more than sycophantic shills whose devotion only serves to wall the President off from seeing the bigger picture and recognizing his error instead of reinforcing it.
This is not to say that Hewitt isn't trying to rise above Kos-like potshots (and second-hand ones at that). But his attempts at reasonable persuasion border on the convergence of pathos, absurdity, and the bizarre:
Hugh Hewitt has now criticized [John Miller] twice (at least) for raising a simple question earlier this week: Why aren’t evangelicals more concerned about the fact that Harriet Miers ran the Texas lottery? Memo to HH: Of course I recognize that evangelicals make up a diverse group with varied opinions on the merits and morals of gambling. But a large number of them also oppose it passionately. Earlier this year, Jim Dobson, Chuck Colson, and more than 200 other religious leaders signed an open letter that called gambling a “menace to our national welfare." Well, what’s the Texas lottery if not state-sponsored gambling? (Go here for more evangelical perspectives on lotteries.) Miers’ public record is thin, but the Texas lottery is part of it. Perhaps she disagrees with Dobson and other evangelical leaders on whether governments should be in the gambling business. Perhaps she even took the lottery job, as Hewitt suggests, “with the aim of improving it” (whatever that means). I would certainly like to know more. I just wish Hewitt didn’t consider the question inconvenient. [emphasis added]
Of course it's inconvenient - because he has no serious answer to it. The best he can do is that lame "she took the lottery job with the aim of improving it" retort. He has to realize that her heading a state-sponsored gambling concern undermines her evangelical credentials (Sure, Jesus went to where the harlots and tax-collectors were, but he didn't join their "professions" in order to try and reach them...), including the very Christian voices recruited and cultivated to flack for her candidacy. Consequently, obfuscation is his only alternative.
And as we can see, once Hewitt starts obfuscating, it quickly morphs into galloping fantasizing:
Hugh Hewitt suggests that there will be a major crack-up on the Right because of the Miers imbroglio. "It is also certain that a crucial slice of the evangelical base will perceive in the rejection of Miers a rejection of their status as equal partners in the governing coalition," he writes. Well, see, there's yet another problem with game-playing nominations like this one. Judging from what [John Podhoretz has] been hearing and the hundreds of e-mails I've been receiving, there are just as many evangelicals who are appalled by the Miers selection.
This, of course, dovetails with Hewitt's elsewhere description of evangelicals as "a diverse group with varied opinions," which is apparently inconvenient to deploy in this instance, prompting a dizzying whipsaw into monolithic "identity politics," as J-Pod further elaborates today:
The estimable Hugh Hewitt asserts that it is a matter of simple fact that there will be a "Miers effect" that will take down vulnerable Republican senators in 2006 should she be defeated or her name withdrawn because Evangelicals and others will stay home:
"The effect will happen. It is not a response to say it shouldn't occur, or that these Evangelicals are wrong or that they should know better. It will happen, and it will harm the GOP's position going into 2006...."
This is quite an assertion. All we know about Miers, and all any Evangelical voter knows about Miers, is that she belongs to an Evangelical church. I have no doubt she is a woman of faith. But it's not like Bush appointed Rick Warren, whose book has sold 20 million copies, or James Dobson, who has an audience in the millions. Miers hasn't been out there on the front lines, fighting for causes dear to Evangelicals.
The presumption, therefore, that the defeat or withdrawal of her nomination will cause millions upon millions of Evangelicals to stay home more than a year from now in a snit over the loss of their "identity politics" candidate - as opposed to participating in the political process, as good citizens of this country do - strikes me as tantamount to saying that a large number of Evangelical voters are looking for ways to cut off their noses to spite their face. [my emphasis]
And, as such, a vast, grave, and patronizing insult to the very evangelicals on whose behalf Double-H presumes to speak. Speaking as an evangelical I find the whole "support Miers, she's a Christian" angle to be an insult. It's disgustingly similar to how the Democrats treat their ethnic minority constituencies, an exercise in group-think that not only discourages individuality of thought but actively stigmatizes it in service to the collective[ist?] political good, definition and conduct of which always rests in the hands of elected party leaders. Sorry, Hugh, but if I wanted to be treated like the political equivalent of a Borg drone, I'd go join the real collective
Podhoretz sublimely calls Hewitt's empty fearmongering for precisely what it is:
In the end, then, Hugh is saying there will be terrible consequences for Republicans if Miers doesn't go through because, well, there just will be, that's all, and everybody better be aware of it, and look out.Uh-huh. Even the Miersians' attempts to analogize to the post-Robert Bork fallout are easily undressed. Mr. Ponnuru did the honors:
Conservatives were far more invested in the Bork nomination than they are in the Miers nomination. Bork was defeated, not withdrawn. And [President Reagan] was further embarrassed when his next nomination ["Doobie Doug" Ginsberg] had to be withdrawn, too. These events have had long-lasting negative effects. But their immediate electoral effects were not so large. Republicans lost one Senate seat, and kept the presidency, in 1988.
The fact of the matter, taken straight from recent political history, is that the GOP base stays home when it perceives that its elected leaders have run away from them and the agenda they elected them to pursue. It happened in 1990 and 1992 after Bush41 shafted the base by raising taxes after solemnly promising before the '88 GOP convention and the nation at large not to. It happened in 1998 after elected Republicans fled the Clinton impeachment question in droves. It happened on the Senate side in 2000 after Senate 'Pubbies failed to even take Clinton's trial seriously.
By contrast, when the base and GOP candidates are on the same page, as in 1994, 2002, and last year, the former turns out in droves and victory has always been forthcoming.
What Hugh Hewitt and the "loyalist crowd" are forgetting is that we didn't work for the election and reelection of George Bush, and the expansion of the GOP senate majority, as mere ends in themselves. We did so in order to see an agenda pursued and, hopefully, advanced. Reconstitutionalizing the federal judiciary in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, topped that agenda. And now, with the opportunity to regain lost Olympian ground finally at hand, Bush punted instead. This is a betrayal, plain and simple, and one that no amount of hand-waving, excuse-making, or name-calling is going to mitigate.
The fault ultimately belongs to the president for blundering ahead with the Miers pick absent any vetting or reading of the political tea leaves, and stubbornly sticking with it despite the growing signs of its imperilment and ultimate doom and the critical damage doing so is doing to his presidenial viability and, yes, dimming Republican prospects for 2006. But Hugh Hewitt is not exactly covering himself in glory for his inexplicable efforts on Bush's, and Miers', behalf.
It's perhaps fitting that GDub and Double-H are so much alike in this sense. It makes the respective professional fates toward which each is plummeting that much more fitting - and that much sadder as well.
posted by JASmius at 3:46 PM
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