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.

Then call me crazy.

You are crazy.

You're engaging in an offbase personal slam for whch there isn't much evidence. You're basically saying I'm so egotistical I want Miers to go down just so I can say "I won."

That's just an ad hominem. You just apparently refuse to acknowledge that my stated reasons for being against this nomination -- worries widely shared by other sell-outs and crazy leftists like the entire NRO staff -- are phony. I just have the smell of my blood in my nose and I'm in a feeding frenzy, right?

It's not a very strong form of argument to continuously ignore the stated positions of your opponenet and ascribe bad-faith ones to him.

No, I just think you have been the one talking nuts these days. And you anti-Miers nuts started with the ad hominems and then had the gall to twist it around.

Pot meet kettle.

And another dollar goes rattling into the dumper. You're pissing away real wealth here, Ace.

...but I should add, Ace, that while your unhealthy fixation on Miers is costing you currency you can ill afford to lose, I do not find your attitude unseemly.

So the question is: has this false start caused irreparable damage, or is there a nominee who can reunite or even fire up the party? And has the Bush administration gotten the message?

... but could George Will make any plainer than he opposes her, and her supporters, on snobs vs. slobs grounds?

I didn't take Will's line re: the "crudeness" to be a slobs/snobs distinction at all. Rather that the Admin's defense of Miers was so hamfisted and tin-eared that it was invoking her evangelicalism as evidence of her CONSTITUIONAL philosophy.

But telling us that she goes to Church doesn't tell us how she views the court's role in the Constitutional process. At best, it tells us she'll vote "the right way"--and even then, it only tells us that WITH RESPECT to Roe. Such an approach is as unprincipled and as unacceptable to most legal conservatives as would be a liberal "results-oriented" approach.

Point being that trying to shoehorn Mier's religiosity into a constitutional philosophy IS crude, irrespective of Will's faggoty bow-ties.

I think everyone's gone berserk over that "crude" sentence. Read it carefully; there is only ONE group that has to bear the label "crude", and it's the White House flaks. THEY're the ones who are crude - they think crudely and they act crudely. And they think that other people - particularly conservatives - are the same way and will respond to such tactics. Will doesn't agree, and that's why he thinks the pro-Miers campaign has flopped.

Lots of folks want to be vindicated when this nomination goes down in flames. I certainly don't see Ace as one of them. Plenty of others who can be rightfully accused of that.

God I hate these Miers threads.

Guys, let's get real, Miers is not qualified.

Ignore her political or constitutional philosophy, whatever that is..

By "qualified" I mean someone who will contribute to the dignity, austerity, and authority of the Supreme Court.

Meirs won't do so. Fairly or not, she is now irreparably damaged goods. She is perceived as a Bush crony, a political sycophant, an intellectual lighweight, and a ham-fisted attempt by Bush to sell another stealth candidate through the Senate because he is politically weak.

Time to do over.

No, I just think you have been the one talking nuts these days. And you anti-Miers nuts started with the ad hominems and then had the gall to twist it around.

Really, Colon? As I remember it, the actual debate has gone something like this:

Bush: Here's Harriet Miers, my Supreme Court nominee.

Critics: Um, what does she believe?

Bush: Sexist! She was the first woman to head the Texas Bar.

Critics: Yeah, but can you give us some writings that show her constructionist bona fides?

Bush: Elitist! Just 'cause she didn't go to Princeton or Harvard or Yale doesn't make her a bad person.

Critics: We didn't say that, we just asked...

Bush: Trust me.

Will is denying that conservatives are crude in the way that those who make crude appeals assume. He is just calling the manipulations crude, which they are, embarassingly so. I have found Hewittt, who I greatly admire, to be unaccountably crude as well, employing and championing ad hominem attacks. Well, it all just goes to show what a stinker of a nomination Miers is. A Rogers Brown nomination would have the left destroying itself. Instead Bush managed to turn a free shot into an own goal. If he doesn't pull it back, it will be a historic blunder.

Surely there's an unemployed retarded chicken around somewhere...

Have you all read the latest on Miers? Slumlord, the insider deal on a land sale... on top of the mediocre answers and lapsed right to practice law... she's a disaster.

Plenty of reasons for Bush to pull it now. Kind of a Kerik, if you recall that one.

Here's the story:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.
The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

Payoff for reading so far: NYT is reporting that Libby got Plame's name from Cheney.