Bush nominated … who now?

  • My local paper car­ried an AP wire story of Bush’s nom­i­na­tion to the Supreme Court with the head­line “Bush taps loy­al­ist for court” and sub-head “Miers has never served as judge.” Yep, noth­ing like the com­pletely unbi­ased Main­stream Media to leave you won­der­ing what on earth their opin­ion is. So Har­riet Miers name doesn’t appear in the head­line, but a loaded word about her rela­tion­ship to the White House does. The Asso­ci­ated Press surely knows that it’s not required that a Supreme Court nom­i­nee serve as a judge and that oth­ers, includ­ing Rehn­quist, hadn’t; but we have to get that out there in the sub­head just so peo­ple know what to be incensed about before they read the story.

    Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t feel like com­ing to Bush’s defense on this one, and nei­ther do most con­ser­v­a­tives as near as I can tell.

    Miers may turn out to be a good can­di­date, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the pres­i­dent had an oppor­tu­nity that con­ser­v­a­tives high and low had been fight­ing for for a long time. He could have rid­den the momen­tum of the head­way we’ve all made against the monop­oly lib­er­als once held on Amer­i­can rhetoric. He could have nom­i­nated some­one that was com­pletely and depend­ably con­ser­v­a­tive — there are many good can­di­dates that are amply qual­i­fied. And by doing that, he could have announced to con­ser­v­a­tives that he under­stands even if Repub­li­can Con­gress­folk don’t that we won in 2004 — that we have a major­ity in the House and Sen­ate and don’t have to apol­o­gize and con­stantly go to hos­tile, unrea­son­able Democ­rats with hat in hand, beg­ging them to like us and not be mad. News flash: they don’t like us. Bonus point: they have every inten­tion of being not just mad, but out­raged at all times in all ways, because it’s the only thing that makes their nearly insane base stop scream­ing at them.

    And by nom­i­nat­ing such a per­son, he could have made clear to the lib­er­als that the jig is up, that pitch­ing a fit only works if (a) you don’t do it every five min­utes, and (b) some­one cares what you think. He could have told them clearly what con­ser­v­a­tives and other anti-liberals have been telling them now for at least a decade, that they can’t hold the entire coun­try for ran­som to their cho­leric tantrums.

    Instead, he left him­self open to the charge of crony­ism, which may even be accu­rate for all I know. (I wouldn’t care if I liked the can­di­date in other ways, and would prob­a­bly be inter­ested to see how long it took for the grip­ing left to have to admit that they have no prob­lem with one of their own pro­mot­ing a trusted friend.) And he appeared weak to both the right and the left by mak­ing a choice that looks like an attempt to either run from the Democ­rats or appease them.

    It may turn out, as he seems to want to wink to the con­ser­v­a­tives, that she’s a stealth can­di­date, and that, as VP Dick Cheney said on Rush Lim­baugh yes­ter­day, in ten years we’ll look back and know what a great appoint­ment she was. But, as Rush said, why wait ten years? We don’t need to employ stealth. What­ever fleet­ing power con­ser­v­a­tives may actu­ally wield right now, we got it fair and square, at the bal­lot box, in the mar­ket­place of ideas, and hang­ing in there argu­ing in the check­out line. We heard all the name-calling and the other furi­ous epi­thets that the left spat at us with such con­tempt, and put some­one in office to send the mes­sage to them that their days were numbered.

    But Bush isn’t that guy, as it turns out. Maybe it’s just as well. A per­son who looked as good on paper as Bush did prob­a­bly could make you think that Repub­li­cans could stop being politi­cians long enough to take up arms and help us fight the cul­tural war. No such luck. Looks like we’ve got another decade or two in the check­out line.


    Related posts:

    1. When no one was look­ing, Cindy Shee­han went com­pletely mad
    2. Are hur­ri­canes racist?
    3. Jus­tice Fudd report­ing for duty
    4. Supreme!
    5. Cou­ple Mon­day observations

    October 4th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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