don't be cruel

hateful gop attacks no longer astonish me. what does surprise me is that their cruelty should now show up not in overtly political abuse of dems and libs but against one of their own: harriet miers.

proper criticism should be aimed not so much at miers as at the man who chose her, whose main arguments in her favor seem to be 1) trust me, i know her, 2) she's a good christian, and 3) she's a she.

if those had been his only reasons for the nomination, his wife would've been an even better choice.

my own experience with folk who say "trust me" is that they often don't know what they're talking about. if you've stood on more than one long supermarket customer service line to ask for a raincheck for a sold-out item and been told "it's in aisle x. trust me," only to look again with no success, you know what i mean.

saying how well he knows her is remarkably poor timing, with all the talk against cronyism lately.

the faith reason treads too close to the article vi prohibition of a religious test as a qualification for office. of course the senate won't use such a test to confirm or deny appointment, but the president has sworn to follow the constitution too.

as for miers' femaleness, it just looks like more of the estrogen shield. he could easily have found a highly qualified conservative gop female judge with an accessible record, so why pick a virtually unknown non-judge, most of whose recent record will be kept hidden?

up till now, the best thing i could say about this president was "he's no nixon." dick nixon was not only obsessed with secrecy like bush, he was also so paranoid he believed he needed to have something on everybody in case they crossed him. that's likely why he taped every word spoken in the oval office and put together a list of enemies that included a lot of individuals and groups that were never a threat to him. he never figured out he was his own greatest enemy.

but now bush is going out of his way to name a judge with a hidden record rather than a better-qualified one with a public record. why? all i can imagine is he really means it when he says he knows her.

outsiders are unknown quantities. bush wants to be sure he has somebody who will stay loyal to his (phobic) vision.

the world is a frightening place to g w bush. the big difference between him and nixon is that nixon's communism phobia turned into a paranoid delusion that almost everybody was out to get him.

bush hasn't gone over that line yet, but he's getting close.

but why does miers remind me of clarence thomas?