Hugh Hewitt v. George Will on Harriet Miers

With lots of other writers commenting too.

I'm anti-Miers, but if Hugh Hewitt has been justifiably criticized for being a tad too stalwart in defending Bush's pick, certainly will commits the opposite sin with rhetoric like this:

Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it.

...

Miers's advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

Crude/crudely/crude/crudely, all in the same sentence? I've been trying to make the case that anti-Miers folks aren't necessarily elitists, whatever the hell that means, but could George Will make any plainer than he opposes her, and her supporters, on snobs vs. slobs grounds? It's Con-law Caddyshack, with George Will starring as Judge Smails.

Meanwhile... RedState, which has had quite a few bona-fide scoops over the years, says that some WH personnel are quietly starting a second nomination vetting process, just in case Miers goes down or must be withdrawn.

To respond to Raoul Ortega, who writes:

It's really sad when not only are people who aren't wacko Leftists actually taking Chuck Schumer statements at face value, but welcoming them and considering them to be good news for their side.

I don't take Chuck Schumer at face value necessarily, but on something like this, where a proposition can easily be proven or disproven in a matter of weeks, and someone's prediction revealed as either true or false or just plain absurd, I do tend to give it more credence. I don't think he said that Roberts' nomination was in trouble, for example.

More importantly, as a personal matter, you're just crazy if you think I, or many other anti-Miers folks, are delighting in Bush's and Miers' troubles. I'm sure there are some people for whom being proven right is so important that they'd rather be vindicated than to have some greater good. I'm really not one of those; my predictive powers are so poor I have no pride in them.

Further, I'm not over-the-top against Miers. I think it's possible she'll be a competent, somewhat conservative SC Justice; I just don't think it's a better than 30% chance, and I'm a bit peeved that at this historic moment we are being to asked to make what is, in gambling terms, a sucker's bet, especially because there were so many better bets out there.

posted by Ace at 02:57 PM

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