Be careful what we wish for. This is terrible news.


Throughout the Miers brouhaha, there have been phenomena that have been very helpful to the Democratic party and to all of us:


1) the onus has been on the White House to vainly try to prove her credentials;


2) the bad guys were the conservatives who were bashing her every which way — and they were bad — as Arlen Specter just said, what happened to Harriet Miers was extremely disrespectful and shameful;


3) the nomination hearing would perhaps take up most of November and quite probably create all kinds of embarrassing sound bites for the White House and Senate Republicans, who would be in the daily, public spotlight of having to try to appear supportive;


4) I have a hunch she isn’t hardcore politically, and that would have been to the good. If she’d made it to the hearings, she’d have likely been confirmed. We would have had a fairly ignorant person on the Court, but she’d have law clerks up the ying yang to help her, and she’d get it eventually, and she’d tend to be more liberal over time; and


5) Sandra Day O’Connor would have remained on the Supreme Court as this all played out. This would have become particularly important had Miers stayed on as nominee into the Senate hearings, and taken up most of November — in one possible scenario, perhaps failing, and then forcing the White House into stalling and hemming and hawing until it eventually asked Miers to step aside.


Now we can expect, most likely, a very conservative choice.


And who will be the bad guys this time? Not the conservatives, whose nasty comments about Miers — Bork: “She can’t write except in cliches,”and on and on — Buchanan: “The president ran down the hall and grabbed the first woman he saw” — had dominated the news.


The bad guys this time will be us liberals who want “activist” judges.


Personally, I was enjoying the show, and relieved it wasn’t we who had to create the opposition this time.


And, please note that I am viewing this as the political game it is. We have zero power. We don’t have the White House, Congress, or the courts. It was such a relief, for once, to see the ‘wingers eating their own.

Now we’ll have to don our dented armor, mashed helmets and bent swords, bandage our wounds, and limp out to yet another in a seemingly endless string of very bloody battles.