This post would ordinarily be another MoDo chuckle–for as law-blogger Ann Althouse points out, it seems that the New York Times’s resident leprechaun was so bereft of ideas in that pretty red head of hers for her last column–on Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers (sorry, it’s on TimesSelect, so we can’t read it)–that she copycatted the Harriet Miers Blog!!! Maureen, Maureen, we hardly know ye!
Except for this, dear InkWell readers–take another look at the Harriet Miers Blog!!! The 20-year-old photo of her with enough Trailer Trash Hair to upholster a sofa, the jumbled spelling, the cheerleader prose. Note the site’s blogroll list of left-wing stalwarts, from Atrios to Air America to Wonkette. This is the hard-left take on Harriett Miers: that she is stupid, unqualified, and lacking in intellectual-elite credentials. You will find the Harriet Miers Blog!!! funny only if you think it’s sidesplittingly amusing that someone hails from a red state where they shoot varmints instead of referring them to counseling.
And, wouldn’t you know, this is the exact same take on Harriet as many of our friends on the right are pushing: that this woman, who graduated near the top of her law school class, was managing partner for a major Dallas law firm, headed the Texas Bar Association, and was the Bush adviser who pushed hardest for the naming of John Roberts as chief justice–is too stupid and lacking in intellectual-elite credentials to sit on the United States Supreme Court. I adore both personally and professionally the National Review crowd, but I think it is not only insane but morally evil to align oneself with the Bush-bashing, America-loathing left. And believe me, no group is happier than our fellow-traveling brothers and sisters about the rift on the right over Miers. They have but one aim: to bring down George W. Bush by any means. And they’re smelling blood.
Hugh Hewitt, a Miers stalwart, has accused the anti-Miers right of “borking” her–trading in unsourced rumors, ridiculing her record, hunting for dirt a la Robert Bork’s video rentals and the Roberts children’s adoption records, and anonymously leaking hints of scandals to come to friendly reporters. Check out John Fund’s column in the Wall Street Journal today (hat tip to Hewitt, of course):
“It is unlikely that the vetting [of Miers] fully explored issues surrounding Ms. Miers that are sure to figure in her confirmation hearings, such as her work as Mr. Bush’s personal lawyer. Another issue will involve Ms. Miers’s tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission, where lottery director Nora Linares was fired in a scandal involving influence-peddling and lottery contracts.”
This is straw-grasping, rather like the vain efforts by Senate Dems to get hold of Roberts’s records as White House counsel. You don’t have to agree with Laura Bush that the Miers opposition is “sexist” (although the Harriet Miers Blog!!! looks pretty darned sexist to me) to find this sort of thing shameful.
Believe me, I don’t think G.W.Bush is perfect, and Miers wouldn’t have been my first choice for the high court (like many in the NR crowd, I would have preferred a constitutional law scholar). But Bush isn’t going to back down–a mortal self-wound that would draw the left like buzzards to pick clean the bones of his next nominee–so Harriet Miers suits me fine right now. She’s smart, she’s tough, she packs heat, she goes to church on Sunday–and she’s a Texan. Gimme that Big Hair any day of the week.