Thoughts on Harriet Miers

I'm not saying anything, just yet... But has anyone else noticed how QUICKLY the conservatives were out in force on this one?

Ken Mehlman of the RNC was accusing Democrats of trying to torpedo her nomination and urging people to step up and help within hours of the announcement of Ms. Miers' nomination. We had it in our e-mail box before I'd even heard the news that the nomination had been made.

And how could certain right wingers have been so quick to denounce Ms. Miers' nomination? Initial condemnations of the pick were out as quickly as Mehlman's e-mail. Everyone else is sitting around trying to figure out HOW to assess this woman, who has basically no public record to examine.

It seems to me to be a tactic. Convince the extreme right fringe to denounce the choice quickly, perhaps convince the left wing that she's a good pick, because THEY don't like her.

In point of fact, whether you like Bush or not, his people aren't dumb, they're MASTER manipulators. They knew, before they announced this, who was going to like Miers and who was going to dislike her. They're not going to give people who will dislike the choice any kind of advance notice. So condemnations that come out that fast are either knee-jerk administration haters (which the right wing certainly doesn't fit) or are calculated.

By the way, with all the talk on Cronyism in this White House, does anyone else find it interesting that this is the SECOND time the person tasked with finding a person to fill a position has chosen themselves? Dick Cheney was in charge of finding the VP candidate when Bush was first running. And Miers was in charge of finding the candidates for the Supreme Court.

Finally, with recent leaks about the Valerie Plame case making it sound as though Fitzgerald (the special prosecuter) may actually be aiming higher than Rove and Libby, and with some discussion going on about war crimes committed by the United States, it is also possible that maybe this choice is less about pleasing the right wing and more about packing the court with people as loyal as possible to the President, in case the Supreme Court ends up having to hear a case against him. Heck, with his struggling popularity numbers and the large number of Republican scandals (Delay, Frist, the Plame matter, just to name a few), there's a very real risk he could lose the Congress in 2006 and end up on the wrong end of an impeachment trial. There are certainly enough Democrats who have advocated such, but knew they could never get it through with the Republicans in control. So maybe he really doesn't care about his base as much as he does stacking the deck against one or more of these pigeons coming home to roost.

Just my initial thoughts. The thing that sucks about Ms. Miers is that if you thought John Roberts was a stealth candidate, Miers is positively invisible. Even if we had a Congress that took its "advise and consent" role seriously, there's simply no way for them to do that.

(I'd like to go on about some of the corruption at the law firm Ms. Miers apparently was managing partner for back in Texas, but so far I've not had time to confirm it from reliable sources, so I'll wait.)

Liam.