more typical chimpy stonewalling bullshit...
Posted by headxray at October 7, 2005 09:02 AMNow that our lazy War President has managed to alienate the people he works for, one wonders how his "I'm never wrong" persona will deal with the Miers fiasco. Will he be forced, by his Overlords, to capitulate (shrouded in some face-saving lie like "well, she just got a check-up and she's not well enough to go through with this") or will they be forced to see their grand plans go up in smoke, done in by the one Bush characteristic the've tried to hide all these years....the "I'm always right and you can f*#k off" George W. Bush.
Posted by T2 at October 7, 2005 09:08 AMKrauthammer nails it on Miers:
If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.
Could the curtain be pulled back any farther on this bunch?
Can anyone seriously deny that she was nominated strictly because of her religious beliefs?
Bush himself is going to sell her by saying "even though she has no record to judge by she's a born-again Christian so you can be confident that she will rule accordingly".
Posted by snark at October 7, 2005 10:36 AMEr... Kristol was there first. He's one of the first conservatives to state his opposition to Miers. And it was very public.
The sales job now runs along two lines. The initial impulse from the Right was that they've been had. Miers did not appear to be either intellectual conservative (or much of an intellectual at all) or a Christo-nut-job. Even Dobson mumbled something about having been stabbed in the back.
Here's the problem. There are two kinds of conservative "intellectuals"--the W sycophants who swing in the wind and the libertarians who thought they could use W's apparatus to their own purposes (just like the Christofascists). The sycophants immediately applauded the nomination, as they have applauded absolutely everything else (including the handling of Katrina).
Not so with the libertarians and neo-cons. They expected the nominee to have come from their list. In fact, Miers likely was nowhere near a Heritage Foundation approved list, which is why a lot of people were pissed.
Now, the nut-jobs have been sold. They are easy to placate--just give any old cock-and-bull story. The sycophants are expecting to be next in line, so they are still supporting. But that is still less than half of the top echelons of the conservative camp. And the nut-jubs are certainly in a minority (except in the South) overall. The issue is, will this be sufficient to carry the Senate even with ALL Democrats voting against (not a likely proposition, but need to consider extreme case here).
Kristol is clearly in the libertarian "intellectual" camp. He is not going to be happy with this nomination even if Miers votes along their expectations in the short term. Her nomination weakens SCOTUS considerably in a number of areas, not the least of which is its independence. And liberatrians want it to be independent (but leaning in the direction of their interpretation of the Constitution). That is, they want it to be independent of the other branches of government, but not independent of powerful intellectual cliques.
Some Senators understand this difference and will not support this nomination despite the fact that nut-jobs are a large fraction of their base. They figure they have the nut-jobs in their back pocket and don't need to keep them happy all the time (they can always be encouraged by demonizing the opposition). This is, it appears, where Brownback and Allen are.
So it really doesn't matter what Kristol and Krauthammer think, when you've got Dobson and Moon to tell you what to do.
Posted by buck turgidson at October 7, 2005 10:37 AMBuck is right in his last sentence. And that's the point many of us knew and the rest are seeing clearly now...Bush is just the mouthpiece for Overlords trying to control the country.
Posted by T2 at October 7, 2005 12:50 PM