My "Dear George" Letter

Sorry, George, but you lost me at Harriet. When a reporter asked you Oct. 4 if Harriet Miers was the most qualified possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court and you answered, "Yes þ I picked the best person I could find" ‹ and you did it with a straight face ‹ that was it.

I am no longer a George W. Bush supporter. As a conservative, I have been bitch-slapped by this man for the last time. Those suffering from "Battered Conservative's Syndrome" will no doubt make excuses and find some reason to stay with this serial abuser of our principles, but not me. I have had enough.

I've had enough of defending a "conservative" president who has spent money faster and grown government bigger than any president since LBJ. I've had enough of a "conservative" who refuses to do anything to secure our borders, and whose only plan to stop illegal immigration is to hand out temporary worker permits to create even MORE future illegals.

And George, when you look me in the eye and throw me a good old-fashioned Bill Clinton "I did not have sex with that woman" line like Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in America for the Supreme Court þ buddy, you're on your own.

It's bad enough that she's hardly conservative and has no record of achievement. Mr. President, making an affirmative-action appointment of an unqualified crony to one of the highest offices of the land is wrong, no matter what your politics. It's not just a mistake. It is shameful. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Again and again, watching you throw tax dollars around like a drunken teenager at a New Orleans strip joint, I've told myself, "Stick with George, because he gets the big ones right." And the biggest of the "big ones" has always been rescuing America from an out-of-control, activist Supreme Court. You promised me a Scalia. Instead, you're sticking me with a "sistah," a woman whose qualifications for the Supreme Court begin and end in her brassiere.

She's no Scalia. She's no Thomas. She's not even a Ginsburg or a Souter. She's a joke ‹ FEMA's Michael Brown in a skirt. In fact, that's an insult to Brown, who had at least some experience as a judge, if only at horse shows.

Your nomination of Harriet Miers is an insult to the court, to conservatives and to any American who cares about competence. She's an utterly unqualified crony who has never sat on the bench, never written on constitutional issues, never been involved in a single significant issue or overseen an important case. According to you, Mr. President, she's been your attorney off and on for 10 years, and you've never once discussed the issue of abortion and the Constitution!

George, you have done more than merely betray your conservative supporters. You have embarrassed us. You have made incompetence and cronyism part of the conservative character. You kept CIA director George Tenet after the worst terrorist attack in American history occurred on his watch. You kept Michael "Best In Show" Brown in a job at FEMA he was never qualified to do. And now you're giving the Dallas Library Lady a seat on the highest court in the land and telling us, "Trust me, I know she's good"?

Trust you? You just went on TV and told me that Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in America to sit on the Supreme Court! C'mon George, even Harriet's MOM doesn't believe that.

And now we find out that, in addition to giving campaign checks to Al Gore, Miers chaired an American Bar Association panel that recommended legalization of gay adoption and American participation in the International Criminal Court ‹ both liberal positions that you oppose. So mediocre is the Miers pick that your supporters have already fallen back to the "Don't worry, we'll probably get another pick before Bush is gone" defense.

Mr. President, if you honestly believe that Harriet Miers is the most qualified candidate, then you wouldn't be qualified to be president.

But you don't believe it, and you know it. The question is "why?" You've got 55 Republicans in the Senate, you had a dozen well-qualified conservative candidates you could have chosen from, several of them women. Why pick an incompetent crony when you held all the cards?

I fear that, when all the layers are pulled away, we will find that your answer will be "because I wanted to." You knew it would leave conservatives disappointed and despondent; you know she's a second-rate nominee at best; but in your heart you are what I've always feared you were: a Bushie, a spoiled, rich-kid president's son who has spent your life doing what you wanted whenever you wanted and making sure everyone else knows it. The more people complained about cronyism, the more determined you were to shove one down our throats.

Well, Mr. President, you've certainly made that perfectly clear. You've told my fellow conservatives and me that you don't need us. That's fine, George, because we don't need you.

I'm done. I'm off the team. I have gone from a George Bush believer who reluctantly criticized you when necessary to an avowed critic who will support your positions when I can, but not your presidency.

Harriet Miers, "The best possible nominee?" That's like saying "George W. Bush, the best possible Republican president."

(Added you, suspects, to alert you to the thread)

Michael makes good points. In fact, nobody should be supportive of the acts of the president just because the president is republican. If President Bush pushes a bad education bill, we should speak about it's errors.

If there is party loyalty, it applies best when things are done and we move on.

I disagree with Michael on this issue, on one specific but extremely important (to me) point. But I will also point out that the ABA stuff doesn't appear damning to me, because there is no indication she supported the views of the committee she headed. THat's what the hearings should be about, finding out what she thinks.

My specific disagreement is on the matter of "qualifications". Now I happen to think her resume is good enough to "get her to the interview", and I know a lot of people disagree with that.

But the number one qualification of a justice for me, in fact so important that not meeting it disqualifies a judge in my mind, is this: That the justice be a strong strict constructionist, and that we know they won't change while on the bench.

If that IS the prime qualification, than it is quite possible that Harriet is, to Bush, the MOST QUALIFIED of the people he interviewed who said they were interested in the job (yes, it is possible that some candidates turned him down).

In order to KNOW that a person won't change, you have to really know them. Reagan vouched for O'Conner in 1981, but didn't really know her. Bush Sr vouched for Souter, but again he didn't really know him. Reagan kind of got taken a 2nd time with Kennedy, who was supposed to be the fix for O'Conner.

So, here is Bush. The one thing we all tell him is NO SOUTERS. Well, how does he ensure that. He knows that good conservatives sold Souter to his Dad, because he was there. Now good conservatives are selling judges to him

But he also has Harriet. She's been vetting his judges for years now, telling him whether they meet the strict constructionist test. She has been spot-on in identifying good justices (which btw seems to indicate she has enough of a grasp of constitutional issues to at least DISCUSS them with smart nominees, and to discern their position).

And, in his 10 years of knowing her, he has learned about her character 1st-hand. He KNOWS she won't change. So, if she is a strict construtionist NOW, she will be 10 years from now.

In fact, Bush has said just that. And he has said that was HIS PRIMARY QUALIFICATION.

So, if you agree with Bush that strict-constructionist-now-and-forever is the prime qualification, then all you need to know about Harriet is, IS BUSH CORRECT?

As to whether she understands and attaches herself to the strict constructionist view is something we can learn at the hearings. And if she won't answer, she should be rejected. If she DOES answer, and her answers are wrong, she should be rejected.

If she does answer, and answers correctly, then we have only one question remaining. Do we trust that Bush knows she won't change? Or do we need a paper trail in order to have that trust?

That is something each person has to decide. I have decided that, if she answers correctly, that will prove Bush was right about her views, and then I will trust him about her unchanging attitude.

And regardless of the "meritocracy" argument, and it does have merit, no doubt, there isn't a single conservative among us who would have accepted ANY candidate, no matter HOW high they were on the meritocracy scale, if ten years after they were appointed, they were voting like stevens.

In other words, we want a meritocracy pick, but not as much as we want a strict constructionist who will remain failthful through her entire career.

In that sense, if Bush is right, she meets the prime qualification for the post. Even though she is only one of the top 100 laywers, rather than the best in the country.

Other than the personal attacks, the arguments for and against Harriet here have been very enlightening.

Another thing that most don't want to remember is that REPUBLICANS appointed 7 of the nine Supreme Court Justices now on the Court! The Republicans appoint just enough Liberals to make sure the Court make up doesn't change and we inexorably slide to an elitist led socialist state. He Can't appoint another Scalia or Thomas to the Court because that will change the liberal balance so he appoints an unknown that is going to turn out to be liberal or "moderate". Then most here will rationalize that was the "best we could get". This is also the crowd that no matter how liberal a "conservative" performs will sit there saying we must vote for the lesser of two evils or it will destroy us even though the "conservatives" are spending like the drunken liberals they despise. I call it the Sulu syndrome. It is like Sulu in the episode "And the Children shall lead" when the kids have affected his mind to think giant knives are holding them on the course they don't want to be on. In order to turn things around you have to grow from the bottom up. Look into the America First Party. That is what they are doing.

Ravenstar

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