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Miers a “disaster”—and so is the president who picked her
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s program last night, Robert Bork called the Harriet Miers nomination “a disaster on every level…. [S]o far as anyone can tell she has no experience with constitutional law whatever.” Carlson then noted that the White House “flaks” who have been appearing on his program have been arguing that as a woman who has no experience with constitutional law Miers would bring “diversity” to the Court. I don’t think even Clinton sank to quite this level in selecting and arguing for a nominee. What Bush’s choice of Miers suggests is that his relationship with the social conservatives has been a fraud from the start. Exactly like his pa, W knew that conservatives’ support was his ticket to the White House, so he set about courting them. He put on a much bigger and better conservative act than his father had done, but, just like his father, he never meant any of it, he never even liked the conservatives, he resented them and their constant demands that he live up to his pledges to them which he had never meant anyway. And now that resentment is coming out in this nomination which is a slap in the face to the conservatives who have not only been his principal supporters, but who have gone to the mat for him time after time, betraying themselves, when he has betrayed them. Bush’s main selling points, his honesty, honor, and air of Christian wholesomeness, are revealed as a fraud. He is as devious and insincere as Nixon. The above may sound like a contradiction, since, when President Bush has previously been accused of breaking campaign promises, I have pointed out that he has been honest about his goals from the start. For example, during the 2000 campaign, he was entirely straightforward in his support for open borders, multiculturalism, and the Hispanicization of America. But he didn’t have to lie about those issues because the social conservatives whose support he needed were indifferent to them. What the social conservatives cared about was defending traditional family values, reversing the leftward direction of the Supreme Court, and ending the judicial usurpation of legislative power, and it was in those areas that Bush made pledges he was not serious about fulfilling.
Thus his opposition to homosexual marriage has been pro forma at best; he barely lifted a finger to advance the marriage amendment in the Congress. Then he allowed his vice president publicly to state his own support for homosexual marriage. This was an unprecedented split between a president and his vice president, by which Bush was clearly demonstrating that he was not serious on the marriage issue, yet the conservatives, loyal to their man despite his disloyalty to them, never made an issue of it. Similarly, Bush has said that he supports homosexual civil unions, which is tantamount to homosexual marriage and would lead inevitably to it. Once again, the conservatives failed to protest Bush’s obvious betrayal. Then Bush campaigned for the re-election of Republican social liberal Arlen Spector over a plausible conservative challenger, thus assuring that Spector would be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee blocking conservative judicial nominees, and the social conservatives said nothing. Then Bush nominated as Chief Justice a man who had worked for a homosexual lobbying group to overturn the Colorado anti-homosexual-rights referendum, and the conservatives supported him on that as well. Only with the Miers nomination have the conservatives finally had it. But, if they had not been such loyal team players, if they had stood up against Bush’s earlier betrayals, he would not have felt he could get away with nominating Miers. Today’s conservatives say that you have to play the political game to advance your principles. Now they have learned, to their despair, that you cannot advance or even maintain your principles, if you keep putting them on hold for the sake of misplaced political loyalty. Email entry |