The President's New Clothes

Are you enjoying the controversy over President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court as much as I am? Nothing so pleases the heart of a progressive as watching conservatives devouring their own -- it is, after all, what they do best.

The most amusing part of the whole thing is to see the scales falling from the eyes of these conservatives as they finally realize, five years into his administration, that Bush really is the asshole that we on the left have been saying he was all these years. To read Ann Coulter saying that:

"Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ... "

is to know a rare kind of bliss. Just who do you think has been in the White House since 2001? you're tempted to say, Harry freakin' Truman?

Bush's choice of Miers has shown conservatives who Bush really is. When Charles Krauthammer writes that:

"...nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom."

he's only saying what progressives have known all along. Movement conservatives (the ones who worship Ronald Reagan and thought in 2000 that George W. Bush was going to morph from a mediocre drunk into Ronald Reagan redux) are appalled, partly because the choice of Miers is so undistinguished, and partly because it is so revealing, not only about the kind of person Bush is (his cronyism, his lack of intellectual rigor and unwillingness to look past his own nose), but it also plays up how Bush has played them (and the rest of the country, for that matter) like chumps for the past five years.

Possibly my favorite comment on this whole debacle has been from Wiliam Kristol, in The Weekly Standard, who took Bush's choice of a lemon for the Supreme Court and constructed an entire lemonade stand from it:

"But the reaction of conservatives to this deeply disheartening move by a president they otherwise support and admire has been impressive. There has been an extraordinarily energetic and vigorous debate among conservatives as to what stance to take towards the Miers nomination, a debate that does the conservative movement proud. The stern critics of the nomination have, in my admittedly biased judgment, pretty much routed the half-hearted defenders. In the vigor of their arguments, and in their willingness to speak uncomfortable truths, conservatives have shown that they remain a morally serious and intellectually credible force in American politics."

You get the feeling that, if Bush does get impeached in the next two years, as I think likely, that some conservatives will be secretly glad when it happens? After all, Bush has done to them what Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky. And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

Tom Moran