Cheat-Seeking Missles

Friday, October 14, 2005

A Brilliant Miers Court?

Just as I stopped listening to Fox News when it became "missing white girl central," I have stopped listening to Laura Ingraham because she's become overwhelmed with one story, and it's a stupid, degrading, non-news story that's no better than the latest missing white girl expose.

For the same reason, I'm even reading less of some of my favorite blogs, like Malkin and Patterico.

The story, of course, is Harriet Miers' incompetence and just as important, her critics' protestations that they are not elitist snobs who have turned tail on principle.

I want to shout, "Shut up and let the woman speak!"

Just wait until the hearings. There is no reason to withdraw this nomination, despite all your high-faluttin' arguments that attempt to create substance out of smoke and mirrors. Let the woman rise or fall on her own abilities, not your judgment!

You can sense my level of frustration. Which is why I enjoyed today's NYTimes op/ed by former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, "The Harriet Miers I Know." He predicts in Harriet Miers a brilliant Supreme Court justice; here's his conclusion:

Although it is conceivable that President Bush has had his fill of advice from overreaching pundits, that is not why he chose Harriet Miers. Maybe he didn't want somebody who had been planning for 20 years for a place on the Supreme Court. Maybe he has looked around every so often and noticed that the least assuming person in the room was also the most capable and discerning. Or maybe he remembered how the hardest-working person in the White House found time to prepare the will of a terminally ill 27-year-old colleague, and to spend nights and mornings staying with her and praying with her.

Whatever his reasons, what America got is a nominee of enormous legal ability and ferocious integrity, and in the bargain a gracious Christian woman only more qualified for her new role because she would never have sought it for herself. And in a few years, when the same critics we hear now are extolling the clarity, consistency and perhaps even the "brilliance" of judicial opinions, that's when you'll know it's the Miers court.

h/t Memeorandum