Steve Dillard of Southern Appeal and Confirm Them has gone out on a limb and made a prediction as to who George Bush will nominate to the Supreme Court.
THE L.A. TIMES THINKS HE’S WRONG.
But in Feddie’s favor, he was right when–just prior to the beginning of the Miers debacle–he predicted that Bush would choose badly.
Now he thinks the replacement choice for Miers may be stellar.
I hope he’s right.
We’ll probably know Monday.
Rosa Parks, the quiet seamstress who sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white man, died Monday at the age of 92. (As an aside, beyond the issues of racial bigotry, which are heinous in and of themselves and which I do not intend to trivialize, I’ve wondered if that white man’s mama dressed him down for expecting a lady to give him her seat.)
"[Congressman John] Conyers [D-MI], who first met Parks during the early days of the civil rights struggle, recalled Monday that she worked on his original congressional staff when he first was elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.
"’I think that she, as the mother of the new civil rights movement, has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world,’ he told CNN in a telephone interview. ‘She was a real apostle of the nonviolence movement.’
"He remembered her as someone who never raised her voice — an eloquent voice of the civil rights movement."
"’You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene — just a very special person,’ he said, adding that ‘there was only one’ Rosa Parks."
While reading through this section of Parks’ obituary, I was struck by the Marian tone of the piece. Parks was a motherly figure to the movement and offered a presence that gave the cause a mantle of quiet dignity and courage. Interesting, isn’t it, how great paradigm shifts in history are often ushered in by women? Men may take the lead in fighting the battle, but the "incarnation" of the moment often enough enters history through a woman.
May Rosa Parks rest in peace and may perpetual light shine upon her through Christ our Lord, as mediated by Mary his most holy Mother.
It’s time for an intervention in the Bush family.
I know that, as governor of Florida, you are very concerned about the troubles your state is in as a result of Hurricane Wilma. You have a lot of troubles on your plate right now, and our prayers are with you and the Floridians who are suffering from this natural disaster.
But there is another matter that you and other family members must attend to. The Bushes are a political family that seeks to be one of the premier families of American politics, like the Kennedies used to be. But your brother, the president, is rapidly destroying the family’s chances of continuing to play a leading role in American politics.
Your father, it must be admitted, is not fondly remembered. He was elected in order to continue the conservative vision of Ronald Reagan but instead he is judged to be as a mediocre successor who made glaring mistakes that have permanently tarnished his reputation. Chief among these were raising taxes, failing to deal with Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War, and appointing the walking abomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court.
Your brother is in the process of making parallel mistakes.
Though he was smart enough to pass tax cuts that have stimulated the economy, his flagrant and unconstrained government spending is likely to eradicate the good done by lowering taxes.
The current Iraq War is, as you know, a real political albatross. Your brother’s intentions may have been good and going to war may have been the right decision at the time, but the failure to find WMDs and the ongoing insurgency have given your opponents all the resources they need to use this war as a colossal embarrasment to your brother.
Now we come to the Harriet Miers situation.
As you know, it’s a catastrophic mess that was created when your brother went against the advice of his advisors and picked a stealth nominee who also plays into the cronyism charges to which your brother is vulnerable. The problems with Harriet Miers are so numerous that I can’t possibly go into them now, but the important point is that your brother has totally welshed on his promise to appoint justices like Scalia and Thomas.
He has stabbed the conservative movement in the back at a moment that should have been the culmination of thirty years of intense effort to take back the Court from the justices who have been usurping the democratic process in this nation and imposing their own values on the land.
Your father is ill-remembered for his "Read my lips: No new taxes" promise, which the then broke. Your brother is now in the process of similarly destroying his own reputation with conservatives by breaking his promise to appoint justices like Scalia and Thomas.
For further background on the scope of the disaster, please read
AND THIS ARTICLE BY THE WASHINGTON POST ON MIERS’ JUDICIAL PHILOSOPHY
I mean, you read these things and it’s simply flabbergasting. The incoherence and inconsistency of Miers’ views cries out for explanation, and the likely explanations are not good ones. One of my blog readers insightfully commented:
When she sent back the pro-life questionnaire, she was running for
political office as a conservative in a conservative city. I think
political exigencies are enough to explain it, especially considering
the paucity of other evidence as to her being pro-life (like church
attendance and paying the minimum to attend a pro-life dinner once).
Choosing between the quesionnaire filled out while running for office
and the speech given while not running for office, I give the speech
more weight, especially since it is at a later date after the election
of Bill Clinton and after the Casey decision. At best, she plays to the
crowd she’s with and that is a very bad thing for a prospective justice to do.Before reading that article, I thought she was probably O’Connor II
with fewer qualifications. Now I think she’s as likely to turn out to
be Harry Blackmun in a dress, both in terms of mediocrity and in terms
of judicial philosophy.
Blackmun in a dress is very possibly correct! She may actually be worse than Souter!
The longer her nomination remains in place, the worse things are for your brother. His bridges to his base get more burned with every day that goes by. It’s time for a swift and dramatic course correction.
This is not only for purposes of salvaging your brother’s reputation and his ability to accomplish anything in his remaining three years in office, it’s also for purposes of protecting the family’s legacy and political future.
I mean, your father was something that conservatives had to overlook in nominating your brother for the presidency. "Yeah, we know the first Bush was bad–a phony conservative–but this one is better–he’s a real conservative" was the message.
Now it looks like that is not the case and that your brother is a phony conservative, too.
Frankly, I don’t care what his personal views are as long as he delivers where it counts, and where it counts is the Supreme Court.
So let me tell you what will happen if the Miers nomination goes forward and (God forbid) she gets on the Supreme Court and turns out to be anything other than a firm originalist: Conservatives will not trust your family with the chance to run for the presidency again.
The first President Bush was a "fool me once" situation, and the second President Bush is turning into a "fool me twice"situation. There will be no third President Bush.
The message that will be driven home to the conservative base is: "You can’t trust the Bushes. They’re phony conservatives who will lie to get into office and then stab you in the back by breaking their most important campaign promises. They’re Big Government big spenders, they’ll get you into bungled wars in the Middle East, and they’ll put walking disasters on the Supreme Court. You simply can’t trust them. Find someone else."
Now, as a Bush, you presumably have a much more positive image of your family than this, but this is the image of your family that will be confirmed in the minds of the conservative base if things are put right in a hurry.
Your brother being notoriously stubborn, though, means that he may dig in his heels and resist putting things right.
That’s where you (and other family members) come in.
For the sake of your brother, the sake of your family, and the sake of the nation, it is time for an intervention in the Bush family.
Please, Jeb, pick up the phone.
It’s about President Bush and how a tipping point has been reached with the nomination of Harriet Miers.
Bush has, frankly, bungled an awful lot of stuff, and conservatives have been extremely forgiving of this on the promise that Bush would appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas.
Now that Bush has welshed on that promise, a whole lot of unforgiving is going on. If Bush doesn’t fix matters right quick, he’s in deep trouble.
EXCERPT:
American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.
Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?
There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president’s intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism’s claim to competent governance.
Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.
Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.
Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.
I’d like to say that I agree with every word in Rod’s piece, though there are two things I don’t.
I, for one, never drank any Rovian Kool-Aid. I’ve been willing to ignore Mr. Bush’s flaws in order to get good Supreme Court nominees, but that’s not the same thing.
I also have to disagree with a specific word in this statement:
Mr. Bush has
alienated both a significant portion of his base and all of his
opposition, so he cannot hope to triangulate his way out of this one.
With his political blood in the water and toothsome challenges making
ever-tighter circles around his presidency, Mr. Bush should give his
mutinous mates a reason to toss him a life preserver.
This is almost entirely correct, but one word is wrong: toothsome. "Toothsome" means "delicious, agreeable, or attractive" (as in "a toothsome dinner" or "a toothsome wench").
Rod means "toothy." Other than that he’s on target.
One thing I definitely agree with is this:
Conservatism
is in an unhappy place now, but the movement is still bristling with
intellectual ferment and ideological confidence and is beginning to
look past the Bush era to new leadership.Truth to tell, Mr. Bush needs conservatives a lot more than conservatives need him.
Darn, tootin’!
Suck it up and fly right, Mr. President! Swallow your peevish pride, can the Miers nomination, give us what you promised, and get back to business!
Okay, y’know how Harriet Miers is a fallen-away Catholic who became a born again Evangelical?
NOT!
I mean, she’s an Evangelical alright, but it turns out that (despite claims to the contrary) she was never a Catholic.
Catholic News Agency is reporting:
The Diocese of Dallas has confirmed that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is not Catholic; neither did she receive any of the sacraments of initiation in the Catholic Church.
The diocese reviewed its records after the media reported that the longtime Dallas lawyer reported that she had attended Catholic mass as a child. Acquaintances of Miers had also said she worshipped as a Catholic and attended Episcopalian and Presbyterian services.
So the good news is that we don’t have to worry about Harriet Miers having turned her back on the true Church.
The bad news is that she also isn’t a member of it (at present).
Walton heiress Elizabeth Paige Laurie has been stripped of has voluntarily given back her diploma from USC, after it was found she paid her roommate, Elena Martinez, to do most of the coursework.
Just a couple of thoughts:
Of course, Miss Heiress Thang got what she deserved, but – hey, a deal’s a deal.
I don’t know if y’all’ve heard, but they found this letter that al-Qa’eda’s Number Two Goon, Ayman al-Zawahiri sent to Number Three Goon, Abu Musab Zarqawi (the head evil dude in Iraq).
If you read between the lines of the letter, things sound really good. Good for US, that is. BAD for al-Qa’eda.
Zawahiri is diplomatically warning Zarqawi that he’s screwing things up.
He has to be diplomatic about it, though, because their organization is so weak that he (a) has no effective control over Zarqawi and (b) is so hard up for cash that he politely asks for Zarqawi to send him a donation.
He also outlines what al-Qa’eda’s larger plan is.
I was thinking about doing a detailed mark-up of the letter to point out just how bad things seem to be going for al-Qa’eda–as well as what we in America have to be on guard against–but I had a really LONG day yesterday and don’t have the energy to do a detailed piece of writing at the moment.
FORTUNATELY, JOHN HINDERAKER HAS ALREADY DONE A GOOD ANALYSIS.
UNICEF is bombing Smurfs in an effort to demonstrate that War Is Bad and that No One Is Safe. While no one would disagree with the first proposition ("War Is Bad"), do we really want a children’s welfare agency informing our children that No One Is Safe from war? The insidious subtext seems to be telling kids (the natural audience for cartoon commercials) that if even Smurfs can be bombed, what about you in your middle-class Western European neighborhood? The Bogeyman of War is lurking Over There and only UNICEF — certainly not your parents — can protect you.
"Smurfette is left for dead. Baby Smurf is left crying and orphaned as the Smurf’s village is carpet bombed by warplanes — a horrific scene and imagery not normally associated with the lovable blue-skinned cartoon characters.
"These are the scenes being shown as part of a new UNICEF ad-campaign on Belgian television.
"’It’s working. We are getting a lot of reactions and people are logging on to our Web site,’ UNICEF Belgium spokesman Philippe Henon said Tuesday.
"The Belgian office of the U.N. children’s fund said it has decided to use the creations of late Belgian artist Peyo to shock a complacent public into backing its fund-raising efforts for ex-child soldiers in Africa.
"The 20-second video commercial clip now being shown on Belgian TV aims to show that war can happen in the most innocent of places, Henon said.
"’We get reactions from all over the place,’ said Henon. ‘People are shocked and want to know the reasons behind this cartoon image.’"
<Tongue in cheek>Well, now I won’t feel like a Scrooge for refusing to give spare change for UNICEF to trick-or-treaters along with their miniature chocolate bars. After all, how could I support an organization that bombs peaceable Smurfs? Perhaps I’ll give the trick-or-treaters a miniature Smurf instead….</tongue in cheek>
(Now that I have removed my tongue from my cheek, I’ll note in passing that I have never refused to give trick-or-treaters spare change for UNICEF for the reason that I’ve never been asked to do so. I have never before seen trick-or-treaters collecting for UNICEF, although I suppose some have somewhere since it is an American tradition to do so, according to UNICEF.)
Maybe it’s my current interest in all things Shakespearean — having just read The Winter’s Tale and now about to take on The Merchant of Venice — but this piece of political satire linking the Miers nomination to Julius Caesar had me screaming with laughter:
"Friends, Americans, bloggers, lend me your ears
I come to bury Miers, not to confirm her.
The evil that Justices do lives after them;
The good is oft preserved by rejecting their nominations;
So let it be with Miers."The noble Bush hath told you Harriet is conservative;
If it be so, ’tis a glorious qualification,
And gloriously may Miers answer it in her hearings.
Here, under leave of Bush and the rest,–
For Bush is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men,–
Come I to speak before Miers’ hearings."
Captain Ed has a GOOD ARTICLE on the Harriet Miers disaster.
(There’s also CONFIRMATION FROM BORK that the Miers disaster IS a disaster–from the man who knows more about confirmation disasters than anybody else.)
Captain Ed divides conservative blogger reaction to the Miers disaster into three camps: The (very tiny) Loyalist Army (who support the nomination), the (vast) Rebel Alliance (who don’t), and the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces (who are caught between the two; the good captain counts himself as one of these).
When it comes to the Harriet Miers nomination, I’m a rebel!
I think that the situation is intolerable, and my views on the matter have hardened as I’ve learned more about it. (Helpful reminder: What’s mine is mine.)
Conservatives have worked for thirty years to have the opportunity to put together a constellation of Supreme Court justices in place that would be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has led to TENS OF MILLIONS OF BABY-MURDERS IN THE U.S. thus far, with MILLIONS AND MILLIONS MORE TO COME.
Bush ran on the promise that he would appoint justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, yet instead of doing so in a straightforward manner and saying, "Hey, this is what I said I’d do," he switches to a stealth nominee strategy, which is precisely the kind of capitulation that gave us Darth Souter.
John "I don’t really have an overarching philosophy of consitutional interpretation" Roberts may well not vote to overturn Roe, and Harriet "I need a crash course in constitutional law before my hearings" Miers may not either. Bush has said that he has no anti-Roe litmus test on his nominees, and one has to take him at his word.
Further, the pressure he feels to go all stealthy with his nominees is a product of the PUSILLANIMOUS WAY IN WHICH HE DEALT WITH THE FILIBUSTER ISSUE IN THE FIRST PLACE (Warning: Evil registration requirement).
John Hinderaker over at Powerline is saying that "it’s time to move on" when it comes to protesting the Miers nomination, but I disagree.
If you’re a Republican first and a conservative second then it makes sense to want to quieten things down lest the party be so ruptured come 2006 that it suffers on Election Day.
But I don’t care a flip about political parties. I care about principle, and BABIES ARE BEING MURDERED OUT THERE (not to mention all the other HORRENDOUS unconstitutional things that SCOTUS has forced on us in recent decades).
Pro-lifers have worked too hard for too long to let a petulant president SQUANDER a chance to save millions of babies lives by shortening the abortion holocaust. This is THE MOMENT for which Bush was elected, and he’s blowing it royally.
I therefore DON’T think that it’s time to "move on." I think that it’s time for pro-lifers to send a STRONG MESSAGE to the Senate and the president that this is NOT what they were put in office for.
If Miers nomination can be derailed, great.
If not, a painful enough lesson can be taught that this DOES NOT HAPPEN AGAIN (and Bush is likely to get a third and even fourth chance to nominate someone).
That lesson may have to wait until 2006, but I’d rather have it learned now.
The sooner the better.
I’m therefore encouraging folks to enlist in the Rebel Alliance!
Call the president, too, and tell him how unhappy you are!
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
REMEMBER: ACQUIESCING AND FAILING TO PROTEST THIS DISASTER WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE SIMILAR DISASTERS IN THE FUTURE!