Given the potential jail time and fines for the charges, I’ll be very interested to see if Libby (assuming that he’s convicted or cops a plea) gets a harsher sentence than Sandy Berger, someone accused of not only lying to investigators, but destroying archived government documents that may have shed light on the anti-terrorism activities of the Clinton administration (or lack thereof)–crimes to which he has confessed. It would certainly shock my personal judicial conscience if he does.

Stefan Sharkansky says that with another election in less than two weeks, voter fraud in King County continues unabated.

…a desire to see Bush name Ann Coulter to the Supreme Court, just to see the apoplexia that this would arouse among Democrats and liberals. The halls of Congress would be bloody with bursting veins and arteries. I wouldn’t expect (or even hope) that she’d be confirmed, but the entertainment value, particularly at the hearings, would be immense.

I hope that this withdrawal is the trough of this presidency, and that he’ll quickly nominate a worthy candidate. My suggestion (agreeing with some over at The Corner)–Ted Olson. He’s got sterling credentials, and it would be very tough for the Democrats to beat him up in the hearings, because he’ll bring a natural sympathy due to his loss in the war.

Oh, and by the way, are these people serious? The conspiracy mongery on the left apparently knows no bounds.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m listening to DiFi, who just informed us that Miers’ answers to her questions were not fulsome. I continue to be amazed that California chooses to have two of the dimmest bulbs in the Senate (and that’s a tough competition) represent them in that body.

…and the mainstream media that ignores it. An interview with Peter Schweizer:

I’m not sure that most people take Franken seriously, but the media most assuredly does…His vicious attacks against conservatives as racists are not meant to be funny. He really does think that we’re bigots. So questions about his absolutely abysmal record when it comes to hiring minorities should be exposed. (For those who want a hint, less than one percent of his employees have been black. That’s a worse record than Bob Jones University, which Franken claims is “racist.”)

There’s more there about Michael Moore, Barbara Streisand, and Noam Chomsky, among others. He’s written a book.

Just in case anyone had any doubt from this post, I oppose the Miers nomination.

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.