Patterico's Pontifications

10/5/2005

Everything I Said Before, David Frum Says at Once

Filed under: Judiciary — Angry Clam @ 6:17 am



[Posted by The Angry Clam]

This is really required reading, regardless of where you stand on Miers.

For the proponents, it’ll help keep you from making ridiculous claims that we’re angry that she doesn’t have an Ivy League degree or an appeals court judgeship. As Frum notes, “Those who object to the Miers nomination do not object to her lack of credentials. They object to her lack of what the credentials represent: some indication of outstanding ability.”

For the opponents, it does good to realize that others with a lot wider reach than any of us on the blogs, gets it.

Now, if we’re lucky, we’ll get enough Republican senators to detach themselves from the President’s rear and vote “no” on this travesty of a nominee.

UPDATE FROM PATTERICO: I’m not yet convinced that I want to actively oppose this nominee, as opposed to simply sit on the sidelines, appalled. But I think Frum has a great article.

UPDATE FROM CLAM: I think that it is important to actively oppose the nomination, because the Miers nomination sends two messages that must be stopped early.

First, it states that mediocrity is accpetable as long as you vote the “right” way. As Frum and Will have noted, though, that’s not enough on the Supreme Court, and having 1/9th of the votes is not the same as providing intellectual leadership to the conservative legal movement.

Second, her nomination and subsequent confirmation would permanently cement the post-Bork message to young conservative lawyers: don’t take an intellectual leadership in your field. Don’t work to advance the causes you believe in. Stay away from the Federalist Society. Never publish; abandon the law reviews to leftists and old men. Most of all, never, ever stand up for your beliefs, and don’t dare to argue them, because then you’re unacceptable.

Why do you think it is that, with all the excellent conservative legal minds training under the Luttigs and the Scalias of the judiciary, or the Glendons, the Posners, and the Steven Calabresis (not Guido) of the academy, all of whom routinely take low-paying government jobs, that no organization like the ACLU exists, but only second-rate, narrow obsessive groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the ACLJ, the Alliance Defense Fund, and so forth?

It isn’t the money, I’ll tell you that much.

68 Responses to “Everything I Said Before, David Frum Says at Once”

  1. Lets hope that Bush will wisen up before it comes to that.

    Paul Deignan (9e57a7)

  2. HAHAHAHAHAAH.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  3. Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
    Man never Is, but always To be blest:
    The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
    Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

    –Pope

    Paul Deignan (9e57a7)

  4. Never publish; abandon the law reviews to leftists and old men.

    ‘Cuz after all, if you do serve on law review, your opponents will lie and claim you didn’t anyway. Thanks for giving away just enough of Frum’s “facts” to save me the trouble of wasting my time reading his article.

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  5. I was discussing authorship, rather than membership.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  6. What is stopping the nomination from being filibustered successfully?

    I don’t see anything standing in the way of a win for the Democrats should the nomination proceed.

    Paul Deignan (9e57a7)

  7. Why should the Dems waste a filibuster on her? If the GOP confirms her over unanimous Dem opposition (but no FB), it’s their funeral.

    Their subsequent FB (for Stevens’ replacement) will have more credibility, both because they waited, and because the GOP shot themselves in the foot.

    biwah (f5ca22)

  8. If they filibuster, they gain moral authority since she is a crony. Also, the GOP would be hard pressed to nuke the next time around.

    Here is a summary of my logic.

    See what you think.

    Paul Deignan (9e57a7)

  9. A Failure of Leadership:

    I no longer have confidence in George Bush’s leadership. As magnificently as he led us after 9/11, I’m sorry to say that his nomination of Harriet Miers is where we part company. This isn’t the only example: excessive spending, unconstitutional camping finance legislation, illegal immigration, failure to capture or kill Osama bin Ladin, the list has grown too long.

    We Americans are a proud, independent, and fickle people, and we will follow elected leaders only so long as we believe we are being well led toward shared goals. But, that’s the rub. I don’t wish to go down the road with this President any further. Here is where we part company, I’m sad to say. I don’t want to be misunderstood, I’ve been a strong supporter of both President Bush and the GOP. My Republican credentials are sound.

    It’s up to the GOP now. Party leaders must persuade President Bush to withdraw the Miers nomination, or get her to decline it, or vote against the nomination. How they do it is up to them. I have no control in that matter. I only control my vote, and it can’t be taken for granted. If the GOP allows this travesty to stand, I’ll vote a straight Democrat Party ticket in the next election cycle. I know the arguments, but my decision is made.

    If enough voters do likewise, the Democrats will regain both the House and the Senate. It will be a heavy price to pay, but less costly in the long run than allowing the GOP to betray conservative principles and get away with it.

    I will not support a President or a Party that I can’t trust. My decision is not for everyone, and I come to it with significant misgivings. However, it is among the few options I have, the need is great, and the dye is cast.

    Black Jack (ee9fe2)

  10. Posner would have been confirmed 99-0 or something like that.

    The real problem is that only certain kinds of conservative jurists are acceptable to movement conservatives.

    Geek, Esq. (5dd2be)

  11. I think too many conservatives are acting like Democrats and being hysterical about this nomination. There really also seems to be quite a bit of elite-ism as we accuse the left of exhibiting. As far as I can see this is a woman who is obviously intelligent with a good deal of life experience and public service. She should be given a chance to express herself before being prejudged. It’s going to be fun to see how the Dems approach her if she is an evangelical as reported to be.

    Milan (9f1df7)

  12. What’s wrong with elitism?

    This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about here. Being “obviously intelligent” isn’t, and shouldn’t, be sufficient.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  13. “If they filibuster, they gain moral authority since she is a crony.”

    Excellent point Paul.

    On the other hand, what is to keep the dems from pointing that out and supporting her anyway? They could just say “Well, anyone else from dim bulb would be just as bad or worse anyway, so we might as well accept her.” They could also argue that if the radical right opposes her, she can’t be all bad. So I’m not as sure as you are that a democratic filibuster would work to the dem’s advantage.

    Tillman (1cf529)

  14. Hey Clam, I always enjoyed your blog. Hope you’re doing well. As far as what we mean by elitism I suppose we could debate that. In spite of Patterico’s initial disclaimer about credentials in this post, it seems that many of the conservatives who are most aghast are themselves lawyers who look at this from their unique perspective and a lot of it seems snooty to me. I wouldn’t have minded a high profile conservative appointment myself, I would have felt better immediately and even relished a fight. But let’s wait and see. She could be a dream justice (or not). History is replete with people who rise to an occasion. How about taking a breather.

    Milan (9f1df7)

  15. Oops Clam, I now see this was your post.

    Milan (9f1df7)

  16. Well, this is my post, actually. Patterico is kind enough to let me take up his space from time to time.

    You know that I’m a lawyer now too, right? The J.D. degree itself that I got back in May finally came in the mail this past week. So perhaps I fall into that category as well, in which case you’ll have to explain the problem to me with all us legal types.

    My basic problem is this: unlike, say, a president or a governor, where there are many, many other qualities that matter as much, if not far more, than raw, naked intellect, the Supreme Court’s entire purpose is the use of said intellect, both to understand and to drive the law.

    There’s lots of intelligent people, and capable lawyers, who still fall pretty far short of what’s needed to be a good Supreme Court Justice. Justice Powell, who was a pretty accomplished attorney overall, was one, and his self-doubts about his ability are well known.

    Likewise, there’s plenty of people who are extremely able lawyers who should never sit on the Supreme Court, or any appellate court, because their entire life is spent at the trial level, worried about the facts of a case and proof more than the normative analysis done at the higher courts.

    Those people tend to make excellent trial judges. Miers seems to be perfect to sit on a district court somewhere.

    That said, I think she falls woefully short of what’s needed to be even a marginally competent Justice.

    It isn’t elitism to say that, either, when the bar is just incredibly high to begin with.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  17. I’m confused about this paragraph:

    Why do you think it is that, with all the excellent conservative legal minds training under the Luttigs and the Scalias of the judiciary, or the Glendons, the Posners, and the Steven Calabresis (not Guido) of the academy, all of whom routinely take low-paying government jobs, that no organization like the ACLU exists, but only second-rate, narrow obsessive groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the ACLJ, the Alliance Defense Fund, and so forth?

    That the post-Bork era has convinced almost all conservative “intellectuals” to not waste their time fighting the war of ideas? Just trying to understand your point. Where do they all go, do you think? Private practice?

    Bench (e79a95)

  18. Paul:

    The strengths of the fb over Miers are undeniable. This has extraordinary written all over it for the reasons you state in your link.

    But first, I wonder what the GOP senators will do. The Dems may see fb’ing this time around as offering the GOP an easy out. If the Dems fb, the GOP need only decline to nuke. They can thus escape the liability of having confirmed such an unpopular pick, without actually having voted against her.

    My idea is that absent a fb, the GOP senators may individually be in a tougher spot than if there is an fb. The Dems don’t necessarily need to grab the moral authority here – doing so might take the harsh spotlight off of the GOP senators, where they want it.

    But I qualify all this as less than even a prediction – just speculating.

    biwah (f5ca22)

  19. Bench- no, I’m saying that the current generation of brilliant young conservatives don’t go public with their ideas.

    They’ll be in the Solicitor General’s Office, or private practice. They won’t and aren’t, if they ever want to be a judge, out there writing law review articles arguing for their positions, or taking the lead in conservative law reform suits.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  20. I agree. The conservatives and libertarians I know here at this school (with a few stellar exceptions) are reluctant to join our Federalist Society or in other ways make it known how they feel about politics. It’s a shame.

    Bench (e79a95)

  21. Never publish; abandon the law reviews to leftists and old men.

    […]

    I was discussing authorship, rather than membership.

    Oh, I see. So the best way to “abandon” a law review is to serve on it. Got it. In the future, though, you might want to be a bit clearer on that distinction, particularly while extolling the virtues of an article by one NRO contributor the day after two other NRO contributors (Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg) repeated that very same lie without even attempting to check out the facts first.

    Now that you’ve mixed in your own random arguments with your silly praise of Frum’s, you’ve effectively “unsaved” me the trouble of reading his drivel. He didn’t mention law review, but he did say a lot of other stupid things. His article isn’t required reading, just required fisking. And yes, I do plan to fulfill that requirement shortly, if Beldar hasn’t done so already.

    [I’ll be interested to see it, since I think it’s pretty good. My only problem with it is that he says (paraphrasing) that the objection is that she’s not to up the job. I would have said that the objection is that we don’t know, and that there were clearly better/qualified people. Hardly anyone disputes that. So why not pick one of them?? — Patterico]

    Xrlq (e2795d)

  22. You’re conflating what you do as a student editor with what I’m talking about: post-graduation publications arguing for a conservative legal approach. Membership on law review, except as an indication of some sort of academic achievement, isn’t all that important for the point I was making that the top conservative legal minds shun the public forum in disproportionate numbers.

    I think it’s pretty safe to say that the 12-15 conservative supreme court clerks each year, plus the top drawer of appeals court clerks, can pump out articles on a level with all the generic junior professors out there. But they don’t. And that’s a problem.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  23. Is it legal to recall a president? It looks like it would be a bipartisan effort at this point…

    Tillman (1cf529)

  24. This reminds me of Jerry Brown picking Rose Byrd to be a California Supreme Court Justice. If memory serves me right, she was the Public Defender for Santa Clara County and had no judicial experience. Any intelligent person, even liberals who agree with her, would acknowledge that she was a total disaster.

    Louis Parise (c5d5db)

  25. biwah,

    If Miers is confirmed, then there is an untinking partisan GOP vote in the Supreme Court (if Miers is what Bush says she is). I don’t see how the Dem base would be very impressed with their elected Senators if this was to happen.

    A victory is a victory even if the result is a stronger conservative justice like Luttig. To the Dems, a Luttig would be preferrable to a yellow dog GOP partisan because Luttig might not come down as hard against some social issues such as State-Church. In their minds, Miers is “scary”–good for generating dollars, but bad if the Dems roll over in the confirmation. Their base would not turn out.

    Some argue that the Dems would prefer a party hack to a Luttig. Right now, I’m not inclined to believe that, but we can wait and see. The situation is developing.

    Paul Deignan (9e57a7)

  26. Though I’m not usually a George will fan, I did find quite a bit of this interesting … and fitting with my opinion as to Miers.

    http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/georgewill/2005/10/04/159414.html

    MOG (b1fc6b)

  27. My apologies to Patterico. Had I just read a bit further … Sorry.

    MOG (b1fc6b)

  28. FWIW, hewitt forcefully disagrees with Frum and his comments.
    http://hughhewitt.com/

    MD in Philly (b3202e)

  29. Sure, as I’d expect. If you look at my appended comment to Xrlq’s comment above, you’ll see that I agree with one small part of Hewitt’s criticism. I’ll say it again here:

    My only problem with [the article] is that [Frum] says (paraphrasing) that the objection is that she’s not to up the job. I would have said that the objection is that we don’t know, and that there were clearly better/qualified people. Hardly anyone disputes that. So why not pick one of them??

    Patterico (a0d325)

  30. A question for Miers supporters at Hypothetically Speaking

    pbswatcher (c67a2b)

  31. If Miers is confirmed, then there is an untinking partisan GOP vote in the Supreme Court (if Miers is what Bush says she is).

    Sure, I’ll buy that, at least for the moment. The conservative base is really steamed though – it seemed to me that the choice of loyalties – between Bush and constituents – might be a tough one for some GOP senators. Plus, they probably feel that this will lead to a subsequent pick of an Owens, Brown, Luttig, or Mcconnell – war, to be sure, but one of attrition that the GOP will ultimately win.

    Both parties have reasons to go either way, but if the arguments put forth by Will, Frum, and the unwashed hordes in the blogosphere hold up at hearing time – and a closer look at Miers might just bear it out – then GOP vacillation might not be such a given.

    biwah (f5ca22)

  32. Bush League Opposition

    Between David Frum’s idiocy and George Will’s irrelevant ramblings, I’m officially out of the anti-Miers camp, and into the anti-anti-Miers camp.

    damnum absque injuria (38c04c)

  33. Being one of the wee people who reads too many blogs, I was really steamed over Miers.

    Then I woke up this morning and remembered what a Texas lawyer once told me about Gov W Bush. He said W was making life difficult for his trade. So I smiled to myself and really looked at W when he ran for prez. Then I thought about the UN and why I like W. No, one of W’s opinions is worth more than a hundred of my favorite bright bulb talking heads. I am now cheering for Harriet. You go girl.

    owl (e33800)

  34. I am not sure what to think yet, but I will observe that the people who brought us Kelo were supposed to be A+ legal talent.

    RJN (c3a4a3)

  35. HEY BLACK JACK!!! I want to say I really admire you. Seriously!! Coming from me you probably want to cringe but you are one of the very few Bush lovers that has the courage to finally wake up and see through this group of liars, backslapping crownies, deficit creators, war mongers, and all around BS’ers make up what is unquestionably the worst administration in American history. Their whole policy consists of tax breaks for multi millionaires and war for reasons that keep changing. ( Oh!! thats right we did find a vial of anthrax, and plans for a centrifuge hidden under a rose bush and its been clearly shows that Sadma Husseins mother-in-law once knew a man whose father sold a herd of goats to a man that once knew the sister-in-law of Osama bin Ladin’s fifth cousin..so there is the connection to terrorism we are fighting!)

    Most Bush supporters dont get it. This administration is built on photo ops and smear and appeals to patriotism and hate for “them there liberals” ( actuallyanyone that opposes them is a “liberal”) They are convinced that Bush is just being given a raw deal by the nasty liberal news media and that we really are fighting terrorism in Iraq and that WMDs were really found and this was all worth it. All fed to us by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Sean Hannity and Ann Coultier and orchestrated by Karl Rove..all draft dodging hate mongering liars!! But Bush bots dont get it. Fact is if Bush appeared stone drunk and said “balldnbhu hreg guuh e httt” they would say “Praise Jesus!! He’s talking in tongues!! Praise the Lord!!! They think God placed Bush in power. They may be right.. What they fail to realize is that sometimes God does things to PUNISH people!!
    You give me hope that this country may wake up before its too late!!

    Charlie (8ea405)

  36. Charlie

    Take your meds before you post the next time.

    rls (0516f0)

  37. You know, if we were to apply the criteria being posited here for Miss Miers, William Rehnquist would never have been on the Supreme Court.

    When I look at the people President Bush has nominated for other positions, I see a nearly unbroken string of good choices. Once you get past Christine Todd Whitman and Paul O’Neill and maybe Bernard Kerik (who was a bad choice only because of his personal life, which should have been better vetted), I see nothing but good choices. The President has known Miss Miers for a long time; I’m betting that she’s a pretty good pick.

    It seems to me that the anger among conservatives over this nomination is more that President Bush didn’t give us a fight, and we were spoiling for a fight. We wanted to grind Chuck Schumer’s ugly mug into the dirt.

    But, at the end of the day, none of us is responsible for the government, and George Bush is. His goal can’t be to simply pick fights, because he thinks he would probably win them, but to get a good Justice confirmed for the Supreme Court.

    And I really don’t see a filibuster on this one, because the Democrats can’t afford it. They filibuster, and the nuclear option comes into play; if they lose there, they’ve lost the filibuster for judicial nominees forever. Then they know they’d get Michael Luttig when Justice Stevens retires next summer.

    Dana R. Pico (a071ac)

  38. But, if the Democrats can’t afford to lose on the nuclear option, the Republicans can’t either. Let’s say that Mr. Frum and Mr. Clam get their way, and Miss Miers’ nomination is defeated (or withdrawn). And let’s say, further, that the above listed gentlemen get their way, and someone like Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen is nominated, and we get the knock-down, drag-out fight we want to see.

    In the end, that means we are going to have to depend on Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee and Mike DeWine and George Voinovich and John McCain and Lindsey Graham. If enough of them fold (and you know that the three New Englanders would, at the very least), and we don’t have at least fifty votes for the nuclear option, we lose that option for good, and the Democrats now need only 41 votes to kill any nominee.

    In a way, the nuclear option is pretty much like nuclear weapons: they seem to be a lot more useful in the having than in the using. I don’t think that either side (meaning: those actually in the Senate) want to actually use the nuclear option.

    Dana R. Pico (a071ac)

  39. Xrlq, you misread The Angry Clam’s argument (which I think has validity) that the Miers nomination sends a signal to conservatives not to let their positions be known.

    In context, when the Clam said “abandon the law reviews,” it was clear what he was saying: don’t put your beliefs down on paper, lest you be borked. You misread this as a false accusation that Miers was never on law review. Then you compounded the error by attributing the supposed false accusation statement to Frum, although Frum never said that — and the Clam never said he did.

    So without first reading Frum’s article, you falsely accused Frum of making — a false accusation. See the irony?

    Then, when that claim of yours didn’t work out, you offered guilt by association: you pointed out that Frum works at the same publication where someone else did make a false accusation.

    Come on. I expect better of you than that.

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  40. […] OK, that does it. I’m finished with being a presumptive oppoonent of Harriet Miers, and officially move into the camp of presumptively supporting her. That presumptive part probably won’t go away until the confirmation hearings, but for now, the case I’ve seen made against Miers has been so uniformly bad that I’m forced to think that if this is the best her detractors can do, maybe she ain’t so bad after all. The straw that broke the camel’s back was this entry, in which the two smartest Miers opponents I know both gushed over this asstastically stupid article by David Frum, which the Clam described as “required reading” for Miers supporters and opponents alike, and which Patterico then described as “a great article.” In fact, it is neither. The article is poorly reasoned, poorly edited, poorly thought through, and smacks more of some sort of personal vendetta than of a serious critique of Harriet Miers’s qualifications, or lack thereof, for the position to which she has been nominated. There’s is nothing remotely great or even good about it, and if it’s “required” anything it is required fisking. I doubt either the Clam or Patterico would have had any trouble seeing if the same article had been written about anyone they supported or were even neutral on, or if Frum had written a similarly reasoned article in support of Ms. Miers. Here are some of Frum’s pearls of non-wisdom: The president was visibly angry at his press conference yesterday. Nobody likes criticism, especially when it’s justified. […]

    damnum absque injuria » Bush League Opposition (38c04c)

  41. In context, when the Clam said “abandon the law reviews,” it was clear what he was saying: don’t put your beliefs down on paper, lest you be borked.

    To me it looked more like a repudiation of excellence than a repudiation of creating a paper trail, but I’ll admit that was less a function of the immediate context than of the fact that “law review” stuck out after so many others (those two at NRO were just the ringleaders) had trotted out the canard about Miers never having served on it. This was further compounded by the Clam himself, who implausibly alleged in another thread on this blog (sorry, I don’t remember which one) that Miers placed in the middle of her class – and thus would be very unlikely to have made law review. In any event, it’s not as strong of an argument as you suggest. At worst, the message would be do get published on law reviews, but don’t write on hot-button topics; instead, write about the usual boring, esoteric crap that makes law reviews are generally famous. [And don’t even think of blogging.]

    So without first reading Frum’s article, you falsely accused Frum of making — a false accusation. See the irony?

    Not really. This post is – or at least, purports to be – a post about Frum’s article on Harriet Miers’s nomination, not a collection of random musings of an annoyed mollusk on life in general. Thus, I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to assume his comment about law reviews was relevant to both (1) Miers’s nomination and (2) Frum’s article. To argue otherwise is analogous to your defense of George Will’s “air quotes,” which I guess technically shouldn’t qualify as “air quotes” because President Bush really did use the word on a different occasion than the one the rest of the article is talking about. And oh yeah, he never actually told you he was transitioning from Event A to Event B, but he never said he wasn’t, either. Then again, Boykin’s air quotes probably weren’t really air quotes, either; after all, he must have uttered the word “jihad” at some point in his life. Who hasn’t?

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  42. Xrlq, are you wholly incapable of understanding context??

    Thus, I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to assume his comment about law reviews was relevant to both (1) Miers’s nomination and (2) Frum’s article.

    I do. Go back and read the post again. Clam’s post was about Frum’s article. He then talked about opposing Miers’s nomination. I said in an update that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. He said in an update of his own that he did:

    I think that it is important to actively oppose the nomination, because the Miers nomination sends two messages that must be stopped early.

    One of the messages had to do with telling conservatives not to publicize their opinions.

    If you read that as having to do with Frum’s article, that is emphatically your fault for ignoring the context.

    Now that you understand that, perhaps you’ll see the irony of leveling a false accusation (based on inadequate research) that another person has made a false accusation based on inadequate research.

    Will’s comment about diversity made perfect sense to those of us who remembered Bush’s comment and were offended by it.

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  43. Xrlq, are you wholly incapable of understanding context??

    Hardly. I understand that in the context of a post titled “Everything I Said before, David Frum Says at Once,” most comments probably have something to do with “my” take on David Frum’s article. If the Clamster wants to throw in a few points of his own that have zero/zip/nada to do with David Frum’s piece, fine, but it’s ridiculous to fault the reader for assuminng the author’s irrelevant ramblings might have been relevant to the topic after all.

    Will’s comment about diversity made perfect sense to those of us who remembered Bush’s comment and were offended by it.

    And, as you accidentally proved with that last link that was intended to prove something else, the “perfect sense” it made was based on a misunderstanding of Actus/M. Croche proportions. In a vacuum, an assurance that the President was “mindful” of the value of “diversity” is no assurance at all that “diversity,” whatever that means, ultimately decided the issue. But thanks to the context you yourself provided, it is clear that “diversity” did indeed play a key role in Meiers’s nomination, to wit:

    Aides said Bush had been dwelling on advice from Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and others to consider candidates with real-world lawyering experience, not just those from the appellate bench. “He was really struck with the idea of bringing an additional layer of diversity to the court in terms of life experience,” said the senior official close to the process.

    So much for the crap about “identity politics.”

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  44. […] UPDATE: The Angry Clam weighs in: I think that it is important to actively oppose the nomination, because the Miers nomination sends two messages that must be stopped early. […]

    PrestoPundit » Blog Archive » THE BUSH BETRAYAL (d881ce)

  45. If the Clamster wants to throw in a few points of his own that have zero/zip/nada to do with David Frum’s piece, fine, but it’s ridiculous to fault the reader for assuminng the author’s irrelevant ramblings might have been relevant to the topic after all.

    I’ll say it again: he was responding to a point I made. Why are we talking about George Will in comments to a post about David Frum? Can I assume everything you have said in this thread relates to the Frum article?

    And as long as a senior official smooths over Bush’s clumsy remark about “diversity,” that’s good enough for me. Bush couldn’t have meant anything having to do with identity politics, and his choice proves it. After all, nobody thinks that Miers’s gender has anything to do with this nomination . . .

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  46. Of course it does, given the slot he was filling. Surely Bush never would have appointed John Roberts to fill that very slot if he had realized at the time that John Roberts has a schlong. Or maybe Karl Rove tipped him off to the fact that Rehnquist was going to die in the interim?

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  47. Talk to Beldar, one of her biggest defenders, who assumes Bush set out to choose a woman. It’s not a crazy assumption, given her relative lack of qualifications.

    I’m a little disappointed that you’re playing games rather than simply admitting that you misread the Clam’s post, and that the context was clear.

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  48. You know, I wonder if this entire argument could have been avoided if, instead of putting that response in an “update,” I had just slapped it into a comment.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  49. Maybe . . . but I’m the one who put my comment in an update first.

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  50. True. Like I said, though, this might have been avoided.

    Anyway, I think that the points I made there were important enough to be in the post, particularly the second one.

    It is all fairly demoralizing that the people out there who do the “right” things- snag the clerkships, take the advocacy jobs over LOOT!, and spend their time working to advance legal conservative theory are told, by a Republican president with a Republican senate majority, that they are unfit for the Court.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  51. Charlie,

    You are correct in only one instance, I do cringe, and the suggestion from rls was a good one.

    I support President George Bush in the overwhelming majority of his decisions, and I reject your moonbat rant of imaginary sins. In most ways, President Bush has demonstrated the best qualities of leadership and my support has been, and will continue to be, unwavering when he gets it right. However, in several matters, I’m strongly disappointed, and openly critical: the Miers nomination was the straw that broke my back.

    We were promised strong conservative nominations for SCOTUS, but we got a loyal personal lawyer and lightweight crony instead. That’s the sort of thing we expect from the Left, and it is unacceptable from a Republican President. We demand the best of our leaders, and we won”t tolerate this wrongheaded nonsense.

    This nomination must be withdrawn, declined, or rejected by Senate Republicans. Nothing less will do. This is, for now, a family dispute. We will clean up our own back yard, before we clean the Dems clock. Conservatives are spoiling for a fight with the Lefty bully boys, and all we need is a nominee worth fighting for. I’m reminded of Kipling’s words:

    We got the men,
    We got the guns, and
    By jingo, we got the money too.

    Black Jack (ee9fe2)

  52. You know, I wonder if this entire argument could have been avoided if, instead of putting that response in an “update,” I had just slapped it into a comment.

    Probably. I’m used to comment threads wandering in every imaginable direction, but I’m not used to seeing discussions erupt within the body of the original message itself. Nevertheless, I should have read the post more carefully before responding the first time, and for that omission I apologize.

    Xrlq (ffb240)

  53. It’s ok, we’re all having a party here.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  54. This just gets more depressing.

    JusticeMiers.com, a website that describes itself as a project of Progress for America, advocating the confirmation of nominee Miers, lists the “highlights” of her career. This can’t really be the best that her supporters can come up with, can it? This should give you a flavor for it:

    Miers Was the First Woman Hired By Her Dallas Firm.

    Miers Was A Commercial Litigator.

    Miers Spent One Term On The Dallas City Council.

    Miers Encouraged Bar Members To Do Pro Bono Work.

    Miers Was The First Female President In The History Of The State Bar Of Texas

    These are highlights that are supposed to convince us that she should be a Supreme Court Justice? Sure, there’s the stint as White House counsel, but can anyone point to another nominee for the Supreme Court whose record before joining the court was more ordinary than this?

    [I bet they can, but the real question is whether someone can point to an excellent judicial conservative with a more ordinary resume. Deciding cases by results and writing opinion around them is easy. Deciding them properly, with well-written and persuasive opinions, is hard. Few are up to it. – Patterico]

    TNugent (6128b4)

  55. Shhhhhh- Don’t let any dems read this, just in case it is the winning opinion.

    http://mysandmen.blogspot.com/2005/10/applying-principles-of-war-to-harriet.html

    [That post is a defense of capitulation. Substitute O’Connor in 1981 for Miers in 2005 and it’s the same argument. We could have had Bork if Reagan had nominated him in 1981, when the GOP controlled the Senate. Instead, he went with this Moosmuss crap or whatever, nominated O’Connor, a relatively poorly qualified woman, and Bork’s nomination came later — after Dems had retaken the Senate. Now we have Casey, constitutional racial discrimination, and a host of other crappy decisions — all thanks to thinking like this. — Patterico]

    MD in Philly (b3202e)

  56. Black Jack said:

    This nomination must be withdrawn, declined, or rejected by Senate Republicans. Nothing less will do. This is, for now, a family dispute. We will clean up our own back yard, before we clean the Dems clock. Conservatives are spoiling for a fight with the Lefty bully boys, and all we need is a nominee worth fighting for. I’m reminded of Kipling’s words:

    We got the men,
    We got the guns, and
    By jingo, we got the money too.

    And who are the “men” we’ve got?

    Olympia Snowe
    Susan Collins
    Lincoln Chafee
    Mike DeWine
    George Voinovich
    Lindsey Graham
    Arlen Specter
    John McCain

    Wanna start counting our men again?

    Dana R. Pico (a9eb8b)

  57. MD – too late; the readership of this blog is not exclusively republican.

    aphrael (e0cdc9)

  58. Wanna start counting our men again?

    Put up a quality nominee and dare them to vote no.

    Show some guts.

    Patterico (4e4b70)

  59. We could have had Bork if Reagan had nominated him in 1981, when the GOP controlled the Senate.

    Sez you. My own recollections + Googling sez Bork was borked by a 58-42 margin, with 6 “Republicans” voting against him. That’s 3 more “Republicans” than it would have taken to bork him in 1981.

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  60. If so, then let it be. Let’s have a judicial armageddon, where we emerge triumphant with a Justice Luttig or defeated for decades, than this low-level bush war we’re waging.

    I would follow Luttig to professional doom.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  61. Fair enough. Let’s push for that on Round 3 – which there almost certainly will be unless you think Justice Stevens will pretend to be brain-alive forever. As for Round 2, let’s focus on whether Miers will vote the right way on the issues. If she won’t, let’s push the phony “qualifications” thing to the hilt, and enlist as many credulous Democrats as we can find to bork her. But if she will vote the right way, then for Christ’s sake, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

    Don’t get me wrong; I like a well-written, wonderfully reasoned court opinion as much as the next guy, but in the end, money talks and bullshit walks. If forced to choose, I’d opt for a majority opinion written by Beavis that reads in its entirety, “Roe is repealed cuz it, like, sucks, heh heh” over the most erudite, brilliantly worded, throughly researched majority opinion explaining why it should be upheld. And similarly, I’d rather have a nice old lady from Texas write a sickeningly sweet majority opinion that just happens to do exactly what Antonin Scalia would have wanted, than to have Scalia himself be the one to write a much more scathing and temporarily satisfying … dissent.

    Xrlq (428dfd)

  62. Repeal Roe under any reasoning, Xrlq? You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t want some namby pamby hand wringing crap that says we now know that Roe is wrong because technological advances have informed us that Harry Blackmun got the medical science wrong — a fetus is a being deserving of protection much earlier than was previously thought, so a different policy is required. There’s no indication that Miers wouldn’t join in such an opinion (but there’s nothing out there that suggests she would be capable of writing it). I want an opinion that says Roe is wrong because the Constitution requires that the question of abortion rights be left to state legislatures. It matters very much what the opinion says.

    TNugent (58efde)

  63. TNugent, that’s not what I meant. I Roe-like opinion that repealed Roe or Griswold while endorsing emanations and penumbras in other contexts would be a disappointment indeed. My Beavis example was deliberately worded otherwise; it would have simply wiped Roe away without a trace. Future courts could exhume it, perhaps, but on what basis? No stare decisis, no reason to privilege abortion over anything else that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about.

    Xrlq (e2795d)

  64. Ok, Xrlq, but “Roe sucks, so its reversed, heheheheh . . . ” leaves room for an O’Connor-like reversal or limiting of Roe on the “grounds” of scientific advances. Don’t bet that it won’t happen. That’s just the kind of crap that Anthony the-EU-does-it-that-way-so-we-should-too Kennedy could be talked into. We’ll get a fragmented opinion, with a majority voting to modify and limit Roe based on new scientific discoveries, but only 2 or 3 votes for reversing it altogether and kicking the whole issue to the States where it belongs. And of course, something like that would get spun as a “triumph” — Roe “overruled”, objective achieved. Then see how much public interest there will be in reconnecting the Court to the constitution. If we get this one wrong, there might not be another chance to fix it, at least in our lifetime.

    TNugent (58efde)

  65. Hey Black Jack..well I guess I read my own thoughts into your posting. I should take a morons suggestion that I take meds!!??? Interesting.
    Understand this. Republicans will never overturn Rove v Wade because its a good issue for them to win votes on but if they could overturn it they would lose reasons for people to vote for them.
    You like this man? This man who has sent our men and women to fight for a nothing cause? You support this man who is a far greater danger to world peace and our freedoms than any other man in the world? You support the liar who told you there were WMDs in Iraq and there were none? and you dont care?? You support this man who wanted this war long before 9/11..and who relies on photo ops and hate for gays and “liberals” to carry out his agenda of division, war and bankruptcy? You support the cronyism and lies of this group who outed a woman who was actually working on a program to find WMDs but whose big offense was being married to a man who criticized our great and glorious leader! Well Black Jack you can have him. Bush is a moron a liar and makes me ashamed to be an American. He is a worse evil than any Muslim terrorists and has killed more than they ever did. and you cant see this? We are going to lose this war..what kind of meds will Bush lovers take to blot out the memories of the killing they have done. Where are the WMDs Blackjack?? I should take meds? Typical..cant answer the charge so attack the messenger.

    Charlie (8ea405)

  66. Oh one more this. Blackjack and crew… heres something to really keep you up at night.. I am one of several Billion who feel exactly the same way ..with several millions right here in the USA and I am a peaceful soul..compared to others. Rest soundly !!

    Charlie (8ea405)

  67. Rats, Charlie, (Others should skip to the next post, nothing of interest here.)

    Don’t tell me you no longer “really admire” me. Too bad, and here I thought my popularity was on the rise. Oh, well, life goes on.

    Your admiration may have been fleeting, but as to your question, yes, I do like President Bush. I like him as a man, as President, as CINC, and I like him as the leader of the GOP.

    However, I don’t like his refusal to deal with excessive spending, or illegal immigration, or a few other issues listed in #9 above. There are several others I’m not keen on, but that’s another post. My opposition now is only about his nomination to SCOTUS. I’m at odds now with President Bush, but I’m not and never will be in bed with the Jackass crowd. Been there, done that, didn’t like the smell.

    Harriet Miers isn’t qualified for the court. She has no direct judicial experience and her only qualifications seem to revolve around proximity to George Bush. This nomination will explode in the President’s face and split the Republican coalition. It’s the impossible dream come true for Dems.

    The President says once Miers gets on the court we’ll see her qualities for ourselves. Well, perhaps that might be so, but it will be too little, too late. The damage will have been done. If enough conservatives abandon the GOP over this nomination, Dems will gain majorities in both the House and the Senate. It could happen, it really could happen.

    Charlie, you may not like me now, but you should send President Bush flowers. He’s just done the Jackass Party the biggest favor since Trent Lott let Bill Clinton off the impeachment hook.

    PS: The WMD’s are in Syria, and rls suggested you take your meds before you post. And you might want to consider an appointment with a shrink. Your imaginary friends are many, to be sure, but if they were anywhere near as numerous as you say, that phony war hero, gigolo windsurfer, and stuffed shirt, pampered rich boy candidate, would have been able win an election.

    Black Jack (ee9fe2)

  68. Patterico wrote:

    Wanna start counting our men again?

    Put up a quality nominee and dare them to vote no.

    Show some guts.

    But that’s just it: they wouldn’t be voting against that “quality nominee,” but against changing Senate rules of long-standing tradition, destroying the “collegiality” of that august body, yada, yada, yada. Oh, they’d fully support the nominee, of course, but how sad it is that they couldn’t get a vote on him.

    “Show(ing) some guts” seems to mean that we ought not to shrink from a fight. By such, the Charge of the Light Brigade is honored, I suppose. But good sense tells you that you don’t pick a fight you cannot afford to lose, and I don’t think that this case is one where we want to risk losing the nuclear option when the nominee will probably turn out to be the kind of Justice we want in the first place.

    Dana R. Pico (a071ac)


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