Paul Mirengoff says Miers should withdraw. He says Miers’s 1993 speech is the speech of a “liberal.” He is right.

The chorus is growing among pundits: Miers should withdraw. Unfortunately, I still think it won’t make much difference.

UPDATE: Add another voice to the chorus: the speech has caused Captain Ed to officially oppose Miers as well.

Baseball Crank has 22 excellent questions for Hugh Hewitt, which (unlike Hugh’s questions) will, I suspect, go unanswered. (I hope I’m wrong, and hereby challenge Hugh to prove me wrong.)

Spoons says he is pretty much quitting blogging.

I see his game: use the blog to get a wife and then leave the rest of us hanging. Nice. Real nice.

Seriously, I am very disappointed, though I can’t say I didn’t see it coming; he hasn’t been posting much for some time. Having had the privilege of meeting Spoons, my disappointment is that much stronger.

Change your mind, Spoons! Until then, farewell . . .

Michelle Malkin has a report about USAToday’s doctoring of a photo of Condi Rice to make her look demonic. It’s an amazing visual. Kudos to the blogger who first caught it: From the Pen.

Hugh Hewitt,

I’d like to echo Feddie’s question: how do you feel about that 1993 Miers speech? Specifically, what is your reaction to her statement that decisions about abortion involve a debate . . . surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual womens right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion”? Doesn’t that sound like the rhetoric of a pro-choicer? Given the importance you have attached to the goal of reversing Roe (and rightly so), does this characterization of the abortion debate concern you at all?

UPDATE: The answer, obviously, is no. I’m listening to Hugh defending Miers right now on the radio. (David Frum is doing quite well.)

Incidentally: here is what Hugh just said he will require of Miers from the hearings: 1) she must stand firm and not answer questions about how she will rule; and 2) she must tell Senators she will observe a conservative judicial philosophy. She will, of course, do both — so really, for Hugh, the hearings are irrelevant. He will support her no matter what.

UPDATE x2: Now Hugh has Ed Whelan on, who is newly off the fence today and opposes Miers. Hugh seems to be saying: 1) the speech was made before she served 5 years in a White House fighting a war; and 2) speeches often get tossed off casually. He hasn’t directly addressed the language I quoted above, and called the self-determination language “opaque.” I think that, deep down inside, Hugh has to be troubled by the quote about once and for all guaranteeing an individual woman’s right to choose.

Harriet Miers tells a pro-life group that she is in favor of a Human Life Amendment.

She tells a women’s group that decisions about abortion should be guided by principles of “self-determination.” involve a “debate . . . surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual women’s right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion.”

She tells George W. Bush that he is the greatest.

Do you see the pattern?

Now she knows that her survival depends upon convincing judicial conservatives that she will hew closely to the text of the Constitution.

What do you suppose the chances are that she is going to tell us just what we want to hear?

UPDATE: See this post below. The Washington Post ran a story this morning saying that Miers gave a speech claiming that abortion issues (among others) should be guided by principles of “self-determination.” I am not sure the Post is right about this, and I have stricken language from this post that accepted that characterization. However, I am extremely concerned by the way that Miers framed the debate, and I have added other language to the post that reflects that concern.