Miers Withdraws

--Mr. Bush issued a statement in which he accepted Ms. Miers's decision with regret, praised her "extraordinarily legal experience"--

Um...as opposed to her extraordinarily illegal experience?

THE CULT OF PERSONALITY RETURNS.
Over at The National Review, Kathryn Lopez has written the single weirdest response to Harriet Miers' withdrawal that I've yet seen:

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You know what the relief is this morning? A return to the feeling that this president gets the big things right. There was a detour, but I’m confident we’re going to have good news shortly on SCOTUS, because this president tends to get the big things right. That’s the confidence so many of us have always had in him. And we may have been worried about our assessment for a few weeks there, but there's a renewed confidence this morning.Wasn't the whole Miers fiasco, to The National Review, an example of getting a Big Thing wrong? Didn't Social Security privatization prove a colossal misjudgement that set the stage for the administration's second-term struggles? Or were they, as Lopez suggests, mere hiccups and blips in an otherwise soaring record of righteousness?
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While a cult of personality focusing on Bush's mid-40s spiritual resurrection and his quiet, determined morality has long been necessary to mask his basic indifference to conservative causes, the belief in George W. Bush is beginning to take on a religious subtext: Even when Big Things go wrong, like floods, plagues, and earthquakes, you can take comfort in knowing that they were temporary detours in a benevolent, carefully examined master plan. This isn't political analysis or pop-psychology, it's theology. Back in reality, what actually happened to Miers is that her nomination was greeted with hostility from the right, bemusement from the left, and was finally slapped back by an angry conservative base and Bill Frist's admission that she wouldn't be confirmed. In politics, that's not called a detour; it's a defeat. That Lopez has instead taken it as more proof of Bush's infallible internal compass is, to be honest, more than a little scary.
--Ezra Klein


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006859.php

From James Dobson ...

"I believe the president has made a wise decision in accepting Harriet Miers' withdrawal as a nominee to the Supreme Court.
In recent days I have grown increasingly concerned about her conservative credentials, and I was dismayed to learn this week about her speech in 1993, in which she sounded pro-abortion themes, and expressed so much praise for left-wing feminist leaders.
When the president announced this nominee, I expressed my tentative support, based on what I was able to discover about her. But I also said I would await the hearings to learn more about her judicial philosophy. Based on what we now know about Miss Miers, it appears that we would not have been able to support her candidacy. Thankfully, that difficult evaluation is no longer necessary."

Ask not for whom the sponge tolls, it tolls for thee SpongeDob ...
-- Josh Marshall