Month: October 2005

While most right-wing leaders may be opportunists and cads, many of their supporters, it seems, are not quite that conniving.

So, once again, the generals are being forced to follow the army.

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(Cross-posted at Daily Kos, My Left Wing, and my blog)

Opinion polls, to me, are an imperfect science.  At the same time, they can serve as a touchstone in evaluating options.  The option I’m specifically concerned about right now is whether or not to adamantly oppose the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Here’s what I think the numbers tell us – make the jump.

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For those who don’t know, I’m disabled with autoimmune disease, so I’m on SSDI & Medicare. I just trucked out to the mailbox and got my Medicare & You: 2006 handbook, which told me on the front cover, “This year it’s different.”

No kidding.

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I’ve been thinking about what the Democrats strategy should be regarding the opposition to the Miers nomination for the Supreme Court besides just sitting back with a big bag of popcorn and watching the show as the Conservatives and Republicans engage in such a public display of defiance against President Bush. Frankly, I don’t know that the Democrats really need to do much of anything beyond what they’re already doing. Andrew Sullivan agrees and even goes further by suggesting the Dems should support her nomination; “They get to look bi-partisan, dignified: and their fairness will only drive the right further up the wall”. True, but I wouldn’t go that far.

The gasps of horror from the right today are the result of exclusive reporting by Drudge that reveals a transcript in which Miers said she would not join The Federalist Society because it is “politically charged”. In an effort to be fair and balanced, Drudge also reports on a speech that Miers gave in 2005 praising the Federalist Society. But wait – there’s more…

The first Drudge story also has Miers saying that she didn’t include the NAACP and the Black Chamber of Commerce in the realm of organizations she considered to be “politically charged”. Ouch. Not only that, Miers was once a member of the Democratic Progressive Voters League. Those facts should rapidly increase the number of conservative and Republican signators of the National Review’s online petition to have the nomination of Miers withdrawn. (There are 1,558 signatures at the time of this writing).

Conservatives are now examining how Miers ended up with the nomination in the first place by reviewing the White House vetting process which, as we all know by now, has been seriously flawed in the past. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal reminds readers of Bush’s training at Harvard Business School, where he ought to have learned proper vetting practices, pointing to the fact that Cheney’s House voting record and connection to Halliburton failed to be addressed by Bush during his vetting process. Maybe Bush was on National Guard duty the day of that vetting class.

The circular firing squad doesn’t end there…

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Last week, Rush Limbaugh again got some on-air mileage with his mistress shtick, implying that soon-to-be wife-to-be #4 (gotta hand it to those Republicans who practice their one-at-a-time form of polygamy), had emailed him about President Bush’s October 6 ‘war on terror’ speech.

Her name: CNN’s Daryn Kagan

I say let’s try an intervention in an attempt to save Ms. Kagan from future misery.

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