While Walt Anderson did some really dumb and arrogant things, just glancing through this web site, this would appear to be less a prosecution, than a persecution.

While I’m not a conservative, I completely agree with George Will:

Miers’s advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers’s conservative detractors that she will reach the “right” results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives’ highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution’s meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result…

…Democrats, with their zest for gender politics, need this reminder: To give a woman a seat on a crowded bus because she is a woman is gallantry. To give a woman a seat on the Supreme Court because she is a woman is a dereliction of senatorial duty. It also is an affront to mature feminism, which may bridle at gallantry but should recoil from condescension.

As for Republicans, any who vote for Miers will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch’s invaluable dignity. Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush’s reckless abuse of presidential discretion — or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such — can never be considered presidential material.

I haven’t had much to say about the Miers nomination, but a fellow blogger asked me last night at dinner what I thought about it. A lot of other people are discussing this, but all I’ll say is that I think that it’s the most boneheaded thing that the president has done during his presidency.

Cathy Seipp writes about it in today’s WSJ.

I know you’ll find this hard to imagine, but Louis Freeh says that the Clintons’ closets were full of skeletons. And in this case, it’s probably not just a figure of speech.

What do you do when you’re the FBI director for a president so corrupt? I would have stepped down, and said why. It certainly would have done the country a service to know at the time (of coure, much of it prefers to remain in denial now). It’s hard to work up much admiration for him at this point (particularly seeing what a mess he left the FBI in, including his aversion to computers and technology). But at least this might be one more wrench in the spokes of Hillary’s candidacy.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Oh, I hadn’t read this part:

Freeh says he was determined to stay on as FBI director until President Clinton left office so that Clinton could not appoint his successor.

Did the head of the DNC really say this?

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that the president can claim executive privilege?

DEAN: Well, certainly the president can claim executive privilege. But in this case, I think with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, you can’t play, you know, hide the salami, or whatever it’s called. He’s got to go out there and say something about this woman who’s going to a 20 or 30-year appointment, a 20 or 30-year appointment to influence America. We deserve to know something about her.

Emphasis mine.

Howard Dean. The gift that just keeps on giving.

Kathleen Willie is writing a book. And we can be sure that the junior senator from New York will claim that this (Democrat’s) new tome is just part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy:

The upcoming book

Well, maybe John Kerry is afraid to sue, but now he’s on the receiving end of a lawsuit for defamation.

Greenspan’s term is almost up. Based on precedent, I’m guessing that Bush will either appoint his personal banker, or the head of the search committee…

Greenspan’s term is almost up. Based on precedent, I’m guessing that Bush will either appoint his personal banker, or the head of the search committee…