{"id":500,"date":"2005-10-27T17:43:06","date_gmt":"2005-10-28T00:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=500"},"modified":"2005-10-27T17:43:06","modified_gmt":"2005-10-28T00:43:06","slug":"the-harriet-miers-finale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2005\/10\/27\/the-harriet-miers-finale\/","title":{"rendered":"The Harriet Miers finale"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Some political article or other redid the Barry Goldwater quote for the purpose of explaining why Democrats may want to say “aye” on Harriet Miers. Mediocrity in pursuit of moderation is no vice; competence in pursuit of extremism is no virtue.<\/i> Thus, Miers is out of the way, and Bush puzzles over how to get the second coming of Attila the Hun onto the court. (Which, I guess, is what he wants to get his base. What he wants personally is just someone who will watch his back on the court.)<\/p>\n

It’s a moot point, perhaps. I gather Harriet Mier’s basic stand for the Theocrats of the nation by the realization that she attends a Dominionist break-away church. (And while I’m not supposed to judge people by the church they go to… her fellow church goers were all aflutter with a “put two and two together here, people. Look at the church she goes to!” (The opposite case is that she is so very impressionable that she might as easily fall under the spell of Justice Souter as Justice Scalia… Which isn’t giving her a whole heck of a lot of credit in the field of Mental Independence.)<\/p>\n

I like how the breakdown of for and against was bi-partisan. Harry Ried suggested the name Miers to Bush. [And therein lies something horrific about this nomination and the next one: let the record show that, for good or bad, this nomination was the result of bi-partisan consultation, akin to Clinton getting recommendations from Senator Hatch — that fact which we heard over and over again before the Roberts nomination.) But, say, Patrick Leahy gave a “huh?” James Dobson had secret information that Miers was good. (And therein lies the real tragedy of Miers being cut loose: we will not be seeing the spectacle of James Dobson coming before the Senate Committee.) [additonal note: Why the frick is James Dobson a player of any sort in American politics?] Ann Coulter was against. Weirdly, no Senator explicitly came out opposed… even after she embarrassed herself by turning in an incomplete and at times baffling paper. (Which was a key part of what made this one of the more baffling political shows of the moment.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some political article or other redid the Barry Goldwater quote for the purpose of explaining why Democrats may want to say “aye” on Harriet Miers. Mediocrity in pursuit of moderation is no vice; competence in pursuit of extremism is no virtue. Thus, Miers is out of the way, and Bush puzzles over how to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}