Miers’s favorite author

Asked by Sen. Conrad Burns what authors she likes to read and what she does to relax, Harriet Miers, according to the New York Times, “replied that she did not do much relaxing but that she liked John Grisham’s legal thrillers.”

What’s wrong with this? It’s not so much that Grisham writes brainless page-turners, though that is certainly an objection to his being the favorite author of a prospective Supreme Court justice; it’s that Grisham’s fictions offer a relentlessly left-wing, conspiratorial view of America filled with evil white conservatives. A person accustomed to taking in Grisham’s stories uncritically is a person steeped in liberal assumptions and attitudes, whatever her formal political allegiances may be.

Miers’s fondness for Grisham brings together the two reasons to oppose her nomination: her lack of intellectual qualifications, and her lack of a conservative outlook.

Meanwhile, David Frum has another tough article about Miers, quoting Kenneth Starr’s tepid endorsement of her as “terrific,” with no mention of her legal abilities. And get this. Frum writes:

It’s been reported the reason Miers was named White House Counsel in the first place was that she had proven incompetent as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. Her boss, Chief of Staff Andy Card, badly wanted to get her out of his office—but couldn’t fire her because she was protected by the president and the first lady. So he promoted her instead. Now we learn that it was Card who was the strongest advocate of moving Miers out of the West Wing altogether and onto the high court—raising the question of whether the ultimate motivation for this nomination is to open the way to hiring a new Counsel by kicking a failed Counsel upstairs.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 10, 2005 12:19 PM | Send