Right-Wing Divorce

"The relationship is already shattered. The love affair is already over. [Bush ha]s already dashed our hopes. And he already is far weaker as a result. The rallying cry of the conservative movement for fifteen years has been, "NO MORE SOUTERS!" That meant appointing established constitutionalists. It meant no more guessing games. It meant building a Senate majority in order to win these confirmation battles instead of running away from them.

The President gave us Souter in a skirt - another cipher with no judicial philosophy or track record whom he thinks will be an improvement over Justice O'Connor, a conceit that cannot be verified until far after it is too late to rectify.

Even if she pans out, it will be years before we establish her bona fides. The political damage Bush has done himself by selecting her is already done."

-Me, forty-eight hours ago


Wow. When I'm right, I'm right.

Not that I'm not used to it, you understand, but sometimes the degree to which I am right stuns even me.

Let's begin what I'm coming to think of as Chapter 4 of "The Bush Collapse" with the first piece I came across this morning on my morning 'Net surf, a very inciteful column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Relevant excerpts:

[T]he Miers pick was another Administration misstep. The President misread the field, the players, their mood and attitude. He called the play, they looked up from the huddle and balked. And debated. And dissed. Momentum was lost. The quarterback looked foolish....

Why did [Bush run away]? Old standard answer: In time of war he didn't want to pick a fight with Congress that he didn't have to pick. Obvious reply: So in time of war he picks a fight with his BASE? Also: The Supreme Court isn't the kind of fight you "don't have to pick." History picks it for you. You fight.

The headline lately is that conservatives are stiffing the President. They're in uproar over Ms. Miers, in rebellion over spending, critical over cronyism. But the real story continues to be that the President feels so free to stiff conservatives. The White House is not full of stupid people. They knew conservatives would be disappointed that the President chose his lawyer for the high court. They knew conservatives would eventually awaken over spending. They knew someone would tag them on putting friends in high places. They knew conservatives would not like the big-government impulses revealed in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The headline is not that this White House endlessly bows to the right but that it is not at all afraid of the right. Why? This strikes me as the most interesting question.

Here are some maybes. Maybe the President has simply concluded he has no more elections to face and no longer needs his own troops to wage the ground war and contribute money. Maybe with no more elections to face he's indulging a desire to show them who's boss. Maybe he has concluded he has a deep and unwavering strain of support within the party that, come what may, will stick with him no matter what. Maybe he isn't all that conservative a fellow, or at least all that conservative in the old, usual ways, and has been waiting for someone to notice. Maybe he has decided the era of hoping for small government is over. Maybe he is a big-government Republican who has a shrewder and more deeply informed sense of the right than his father did, but who ultimately sees the right not as a thing he is of but a thing he must appease, defy, please or manipulate. Maybe after five years he is fully revealing himself. Maybe he is unveiling a new path that he has not fully articulated - he'll call the shots from his gut and leave the commentary to the eggheads. Maybe he's totally blowing it with his base, and in so doing endangering the present meaning and future prospects of his party. [emphases added]

Anybody familiar with the conservative commentariat knows that Peggy Noonan is no Ann Coulter. She's not given to journalistic provocation or gratuitously picking intramural fights, or even getting drawn into them. And if she can see the political handwriting on the wall, it speaks to the blindness of the Bushies and the rapidity with which the "Miers misstep" is combusting the Administration's remaining viability.

Readers will note that I have not used the "A" word (i.e. arrogant) in my withering criticism of the President over his woebegone SCOTUS selection. Lefties have used that adjective against him for years, but that's been out of frustration with their inability to get anything over on him - a reflection of their own arrogance and condescension interacting corrosively with the humiliation of repeatedly losing to a man they consider to be outright subhuman.

I have never considered Bush to be arrogant. Indifferent to the necessity of selling his agenda as opposed to just proposing it, yes; self-assured and steadfast in his decisions, most of which have been right on the money, certainly. Even in this cronyist High Court pick I have denounced Dubya's shockingly poor judgment (see my baseball analogy from yesterday) in going with somebody so manifestly underqualified and so completely misreading his core supporters, particularly in the context of his post-Katrina floundering. But the pick was his to make, and that he would stand by that pick, even in the face of unexpected "friendly" opposition, can hardly be called surprising, much less "arrogant."

Then my surfing brought me to this Washington Post story:

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection - Bush called her "the best person I could find" - was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers. [emphases added]

Ladies and gentlement, THAT was arrogant.

It's not the first time we've seen this sort of thing from pro-Miers cheerleaders (I'm struggling manfully not to say "Bush ass-kissers"). Jennifer inadvertently cited this bit of ironic belittlement from, of all sources, the Anchoress:

I am frankly amazed to see that so many on the right have forgotten what was supposed to be a basic tenant of conservatism: respectful debate rather than shrill jeering, name-calling and underarm farts…

Look who's talking, Anchoress.

But that's just an appetizer.

Just yesterday Hugh Hewitt (who, I suppose, I've already called a Bush ass-kisser...) cherry-picked out-of-context quotes from a David Frum column and accused him of hurling "personal attacks" at Ms. Miers and "turning his face from all contrary evidence already on the table," when in fact the only "evidence on the table" is the absence of evidence for why this woman should be on the Supreme Court. It is Double-H who is "turning his face" away from the perfectly reasonable and legitimate objections of conservatives who have worked for a generation to get to this point only to be submarined by the leader who promised to deliver the coup de grace, and who himself indulged in personal attacks by dismissing Frum as "an embarrassment to all conservatives," as though Hewitt is our self-appointed spokesman.

But who is Hugh Hewitt, right? He doesn't speak for the White House, at least not officially.

But Ed Gillespie does. And rather than listen and pay a modicum of respect to the concerns of conservative legal activists (they didn't have to bow & curtsey to them, after all), Gillespie - on behalf of the Republican President of the United States - "borrow[ed] heavily from liberal rhetoric and uncritically accept[ed] many foolish assumptions of liberalism."

Can you blame the assembled conservative activists for being pissed? They weren't summoned there out of respect for their counsel or appreciation for the support they've given Bush over the past six years. They were summoned there to, at best, be patronized, and ultimately, to be told to sit down, shut up, and fall into line. And when they didn't do as they were told, the Bushies gratuitously insulted them.

Twice, actually - with the "whiff of elitism and sexism" crack, and also Bush claiming that Miers was "the best person I could find," which, against the backdrop of J. Michael Luttig, Harvey Wilkinson, Michael McConnell (who is also an evengelical Christian, BTW...), Emilio Garza, Edith Holland Jones, Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, ad infinitum, has to raise questions either about his sincerity or his mental stability.

Ed Morrissey is as dumbfounded this morning as I am:

Has Gillespie ever made such a stupid statement in his life?...[N]o one would have brought up [Miers'] choice of law schools if they could find any other interesting qualifications in her background that give any indication that she makes a remarkable candidate for the highest court in the land, let alone the "most highly qualified" candidate that the White House insists she is.

But "sexism" hardly plays into this when the critics of the decision practically begged to see Janice Rogers Brown go up against the Judiciary Committee in prime time. The same people who Gillespie insulted pushed for Priscilla Owen to get confirmed and not thrown under the bus like Henry Saad in the Senate compromise. Names with long track records of conservative jurisprudence like Edith Hollan Jones got left by the wayside while President Bush selected the person who, not coincidentally, ran his candidate search committee.

Parenthetically, how much of a "humble servant" can Harriet Miers truly be if she herself doesn't recognize how unqualified she is to sit on the SCOTUS? Heck, by the criteria set forth by the President, the only thing keeping me from being named the next Secretary of the Treasury is that I've never personally met GDub. But if I did, and he subsequently called me up and said, "Hey, Jimbo, how would you like to be my next Treasury Secretary?" there's no way that I could say yes no matter how flattered and honored I was, because while I certainly have a financial/accounting background, and I am a licensed CPA of eighteen years' experience, that's a far cry from the pedigree necessary to be a credible candidate for Finance Minister. If Ms. Miers' character is as the President describes it, she should have recognized her inadequacy to the job and turned him down.

But she didn't, did she? Almost seems a tad...arrogant, doesn't it?

Yesterday, Ann Coulter wrote:

Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years.

I would differ with the choice of the term "dictator," but otherwise it's a valid point - and one that Cap'n Ed, no bombthrower he, goes on to echo:

This response to the base qualifies as easily the stupidest, most ill-considered, and least prepared White House campaign yet seen. Has Bush declared war on the GOP? Has his staff decided to send him down in flames, a political version of Wotan and Valhalla? It looks that way from here. [emphasis added]

There is one thing on which the Anchoress and I agree - well, almost:

…The President has named a nominee. She will now have to sink or swim at her own “job interview.” If she is the incompetent boob, “cafeteria lady” some of you vaunt, she will embarrass herself and be rejected. If she is the “pitbull in size 6 shoes” the president characterizes, she will impress enough people to be appointed.

I think Miers will come off as, if not an "incompetent boob," then certainly light-years worse than the SCOTUS nominee that preceded her. But I'm not convinced that that will be enough to bring about her rejection, at least unless, as I discussed yesterday, presidential aspirants in the GOP Senate caucus recognize the opportunity to score points with the party base by opposing the White House on this nomination.

In another post this morning, Cap'n Ed speculates on the surreal alignment that could conjure up:

George Allen has his sights on a presidential run in 2008 and has collected a fair amount of attention from movement conservatives. He may find himself forced into a position where he has to oppose Miers, which would open the door for Lott and others to do the same. Bush might wind up having to rely on Democrats to save Miers on the basis of being the friendliest candidate that they're likely to see. [emphasis added]

George Bush and Harry Reid, the two-man power trip. I can just see it now - which is itself utterly astounding.

Still not very likely. But if it does happen, we can count on what the Hewitts and Anchoress's will be saying - that "right-wingers" "pushed" the President into it by their "betrayal" and "shrill jeering, name-calling and underarm farts."

I wonder if they'll complain as loudly if the Miers nomination is defeated, or if they'll start thumping the tub for Alberto Gonzales before the Senate roll-call is even finished.

I find myself hoping that I get to find out.

thbbppt- thbbppt-thbbppt.

UPDATE: Frum has responded to Hewitt. Highlights:

So if I don't dislike Miers and want the president to succeed, why am I speaking out? Aside from all the substantial reasons I have cited to date, I am speaking out because there are so many others who want to speak but cannot. I have spent hours over the past three days listening to conservative jurists on this topic - people who have devoted their lives to fighting battles for constitutionalism, for tort reform, for color-blind justice, people who fought the good fight to get Bork, Scalia, Thomas, and now Roberts onto the high Court.

Their reaction to the nomination has been almost perfectly unanimous: Disappointment at best, dismay and anger at worst. Here's the tough truth, and it will become more and more important as the debate continues: There is scarcely a single knowledgeable legal conservative in Washington who supports this nomination. There are many who are prepared to accept her, reluctantly, as the President's choice. Some still hope that maybe it won't turn out as bad as it looks. But ask them: "Well what if the President had consulted you on this choice," and the answer is almost always some version of: "I would have thought he was joking."

Why do so many fine conservative lawyers object to Miers? This oped by John Yoo gives a hint.

Dubya apologists on Miers won't like the content of Mr. Yoo's essay, but given that he was "one of the most brilliant lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in the first Bush term" and a potential future appellate court candidate (which he can probably kiss goodbye now), and yet felt it necessary to put even more evidence "on the table" that the President's exercise in nepotism is a disaster waiting to happen, they really should stop with the "underarm fart" put-downs and actually pay attention and be willing to entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, Bush has bleeped up on this call.

Frum concludes:

Don't trust me. Trust your own eyes. The woman is 60 years old, a lawyer for more than three decades. Can you see any instance in this long life and career where Miers ever took a risk on behalf of conservative principle? Can you see any indication of intellectual excellence? Did she ever do anything brave, anything that took backbone? Did anyone before this week ever describe her as outstanding in any way at all?

If the answers to these questions is No, as it is, then you have to ask yourself: Why is a Republican president bypassing so many dozens of superb legal conservatives to choose Harriet Miers for the highest court in the land?

Why, indeed. Whether it's political cowardice, small-mindedness, good-ol' boy networkism, or "growing in office," or a combination of the above, the answer is simply not one that this conservative - or any conservative - ought to find remotely palatable.

Oh, yes, and the lavender lobbyists at the Human Rights Campaign are leaning positive on the Miers nomination.

Feeling warm & toasty now, Jen?