If Miers turns out to be another David Souter, I'll be writing "Mickey Mouse" in for every Presidential election for the rest of my life.
Very very well said.
I'll tear and scratch and fight until she is either nominated or rejected. Then I will move on to the next issue I have no control over but like to believe I do :).
all this nomination does is play into the hands of the leftists and liberals who have been making the charge against the bush administration that it is a country club of stoogism and cronyism... what makes me mad about this nomination as a whole is that bush, when re-elected, made a speech declaring that he now had a mandate of the people and that he was going to spend his new found political capital wherever he needed to...
let's take a look at this new found capital of his and reconcile it with the decisions he has made recently... the first and foremost in my mind is the new entitlement of the prescription drug coverage plan for senior citizens, which has by many estimates ballooned to nearly 600 billion dollars or so... is this a conservative ideal or a placation towards voting seniors for future votes for republicans...? Another disappointment to his base...
the reform of social security... this issue is dead in the water... he hasn't talked about it in months... his trips around the country to sell the idea have stalled onto deaf ears and with the democrats caterwauling this reform into the next, great apocalyptic horror since Godzilla vs. Rodan, i have to wonder why the president caved in on this piece of political capital as well...
next up is the war on terror... this hasn't been sold as it properly should have been... that we are fighting this war in over 102 countries and catching these sub-human dirt bags left and right... gleaning intelligence that has helped us in ways that cannot be recounted because of their covert nature... now, bush can go on the offensive with something like this and tell the american people that with this much cooperation around the world that the war on terror is working and it is worth fighting... as far as iraq is concerned, just saying "stay the course" isn't enough anymore... even though it is obvious outside of the moronic stream media to put as much negative black light on the war in iraq, we are and have turned it around to such a large degree that the insurgency is really starting to fade... when you have 12 of 14 iraqi districts pacified, that is a win in my book, but you don't see that coming from the white house as a pending victory of any kind and they aren't advertising it at all... secondly, the terms of engagement in this war are abysmal to say the least... change the terms of engagement to benefit us instead of taking john kerry's stance of fighting a more sensitive war by letting 1000 terrorist suspects go for the sake of ramadan is hapless way to fight this war...
also, the level of pork that the president has allowed to enter into the budget is a staggering failure of his stewardship of being fiscally responsible as a conservative republican... there is no way on the face of this earth to call yourself that very thing and have such a staggering level of pork in bills that are effectively meaningless to say the least... a president must have his advisors inform him of what is in or not in these bills in order to fight for them or fight against them... that is what a president should be doing and if he is, i'm not seeing it... the level of PR in this administration is terrible... it never presents itself in a positive light or in any light at all... instead it has taken a tone of crisis management anytime something gets out of hand and in the face of the recent hurricanes of katrina and rita it has become glaringly apparent that that the american people have spent money in the form of taxes for DoHS consolidation to absolutely no avail... the people are not seeing a viable return on their money... this is another black eye for the administration...
another caustic and even more inflammatory problem is the energy bill and the price of gasoline in this country... the administration has taken a back seat to the problem and from what i'm seeing so far has become carteresque with calls from the administration to begin a gas conservation campaign... are you serious...? how can the president reconcile telling the american public to conserve fuel, spend $3 a gallon when you have to, while in the energy bill the oil producing companies get tax breaks and tax credits...? i'm a little confused about that mr. president... furthermore, when the president is called to explain how he can help the american public alleviate the burden of high gas prices on them, he has nothing to say, his administration has nothing to say, they can neither explain why gas prices have risen to record all time highs in the last year and a half... not to mention that when experts point out that oil capacity is in an actual glut, but refining capacity is maxed out, the administration has nothing, nothing in the energy bill to address this problem... we haven't built a refinery in this country in over 30 years...? why...? environmentalist fascism is why and the administration has cowed to this group of luddite nitwits as well...
instead of fighting this group of anarchistic sub-humans who would put the progress of the american public in a hostage crisis for flora and fauna that most of them can't even name, the administration is nowhere to be found other than being portrayed as playing and catering to the stoogism and cronism of the energy/oil lobby... are you guys seeing a pattern here yet...
i guess i should also mention the total lack of will on stemming the tide of illegal immigration in a post 9/11 america, while catering to big business even in the face of the fact that businesses that hire these illegals is illegal... it's taken a group of people known as the minutemen to publically embarras the presidents border policy into a shameful war of words and he's even ended up on the losing side of that... we know where you stand on illegals mr. president, but at least have the guts to say so...
with his poll numbers pendulumed into an all time low with no rise in sight of any significance, one would have thougth that the roberts judicial confirmation would have given him a boost in that regard and i believe it did and then he nominates meyers, his personal whitehouse lawyer... YAY team... what was he thinking...? i'd like to know if he actually sat her down and said, "if i nominate you to the supreme court, will you promise me that you will be as conservative as possible...? because while you are going to go through the confirmation process, you are going to have to be as neutral as possible..."
what did she say, “yes mr. president...” and he said, "okay, i believe you..."
this is insane... with a plethora of highly qualified grand-slam roberts style judicial nominees at his fingertips that are staunchly and publicly conservative, he picks a stealth candidate of no known reputation and while harry reid and schumer are visibly stunned into near wordless affirmation of the presidents pick, one has to wonder what the hell the president is thinking... did he forget janice rogers brown, a superb candidate that is a woman, is black, has the highest of credentials, and has served as a judge with record to match...? is there a strategy i'm missing here that someone neglected to explain to me, because i'm not seeing it...
what i'm getting at is that there is something truly baffling about the way this administration makes decisions and who they consult and how they come to their conclusions... granted, we shouldn't be privy to every nuance of what goes on in the white house, but really, is this so hard to imagine with the examples i've sighted...? that this president has taken his mandate, his political capital and spent it at the arcade...? where did he spend it...? where the hell did it go...? what i do know is that he's squandered it on his agenda... an agenda that has gotten him nowhere, has been attacked at every turn by the democrats with the aid of the squelching media as it's coat tailing sidekicks... and we as the base have nothing to show for it...
given the chance to really make the democrats heads swim with hatred for another good judicial nominee, we are now left with playing the guessing game of who this person is, what has she done and why, who she has represented in the past and for what and to essentially follow a paper trail of her resume... to many questions that should be completely unnecessary for us to try an answer with any other qualified candidate that would have erased these questions with their qualified resumes... so now, we as the base have been left with one oar down the river...
this president has pissed away his cache, pissed away his political capital on projects that have gone nowhere, has pissed away the base that put him where he is only to be left hanging in the wind to placate his need for a noncommitalism and the need not to stir a hornets nest just because he's afraid he might get stung even though he's in a bee suit with a big can of raid in his hand...
frankly i've had enough of this administration and while i personally voted for this president, i can't support him anymore... he's shown me that he is a conservative in words and not deeds... i'm afraid that the only road for this administration now is towards the road of a vote of no confidence...
good luck, mr. president, you are going to need it... oh and thanks for helping to define conservatism into something that has shunned people away from it and not want to vote for again for another generation...
:golfclap:
She still has to make it through the Judiciary Committee and the Senate. I don't know if that counts for anything, but they may have the same questions that most of us do and that could be a problem for her. Personally, I'm still waiting to hear more. She has some good credentials - she was co-partner in a large law firm and has real-world experience in running a business (among other things)... something almost none of the Justice's on the court can claim.
Bush may yet have another appointment (or two) availible before January '09. I'd almost bet on it. Ole Ruthie's not looking too swift either.
Remember, the President has disarmed all the issues the Democraps have tried to bring up over his terms. Now, he picks, a woman, successful lawyer, who has been a close friend and one who would disagree with the President when it needed to be done.
Bush is crazy like a fox, disarming the Demos on this nominee. He is trying to marginalize the Demos by appealing to the ones who would be moderates, Reid is a good example. This also highlights the extremists, Kennedy, Clinton(I almost barf any time I mention this thing of a woman), Shumer, Durbin, et al, and seperates the Democrats in the Senate even further from being a unified force.
Yep, crazy like a fox.
Well, according to the dictionary, "whine" is a verb that means:
1. To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint. 2. To complain or protest in a childish fashion. 3. To produce a sustained noise of relatively high pitch: jet engines whining.
Since both #1 and #3 involve sounds, not usually available in this text-based medium, I assume that we are being chastised for using #2, complaining in a childish fashion.
I have seen many cogent arguments today castigating the President for his choice of Harriet Miers. The analysis by methadras was one of the most coherent and well-written of these (Kudos to you, methadras) and, while criticism does involve an element of complaining, it was clearly not done in a childish fasion.
Dialogue and disagreement are staples of lively discourse, and telling those who disagree with you to "stop the whining" is tantamount to Archie Bunker telling Edith to "stifle." And about as intelligent. Yes, threatening to run off and join some third party or to move on over to moveon.org is childish and whining. But reasoned analysis backed by facts is not. It's the reason we are here.
The problem that I have with this is the very fact that she's so close to the president. If this were Clinton I'd be calling it a scandal!
The consensus seems to be that Miers is not the best choice. Who is the better choice, then? The President's choice whom he knows up close and personal or our personal choice whom we don't.
JRB's nomination would have caused a fight and everyone knows it, the fight would have been over Brown's public record and the RINO's might have even voted against her.
The fight over Meyers will be based on her lack of qualifications and her faith, making her detractors elitists and anti-Christian.
Bush has chosen to make this fight on ground of his own choosing.
If he insists on "winning" arguments by trading in ideological stakes for political capital he will never use -- see McCain-Feingold, see the border, see spending, see the Michigan affirmative action case, see civil unions (which I can accept, but not the backdoor way he floated them) -- then I think he has to be shown that my vote is not the slam dunk he thinks it is. Tax cuts are nice, but only a part of the reason why many of us consider ourselves conservative.
I don't expect Bush to turn into Reagan or Goldwater, but his pragmatism serves no cause except his own. And when he brushes aside meritocracy and nominates for the Supreme Court a woman whose primary qualification is his familiarity with her -- I think I'm entitled to feel sold out. That's not how conservatives do it. And I will not have my putative leader taking all the arguments I've had with my liberal friends over the years and throwing them back in my face like this.
Don't be such a killjoy.
Thank you for you opinion.
Now here is my response.
I will not be silenced or told to get over it. And, personally, I am beginning to resent everyone telling me to do so or implying I am trashing her, whining, a troll, a malcontent susceptible to MSM propaganda. That is a weak character attack that should not be necessary of anyone if her strongest credentials were not based almost solely on the President's support. It is very clear that more than the convenient few always counted to speak against, are unhappy with this nomination.
The Party is big enough, certainly strong enough, to handle intense disagreement over principles. Learn to debate and disagree without asking for silence or implying something is wrong about our response.
I am not trying to sabotage her, matter of fact, I think she'll be confirmed. What I will not do is actively support her, nor will I pretend I am happy. In my view, he could have done better and he did not. I am disappointed. I have the right to convey that to the man I elected, believe in and support.
If I am no longer free to voice my dissent and my disappointment, than we become the Democrat Party. Is that what some people want? If so, you'll find the Republican Party will go the way of the Democrat Party when they began demanding 100% alliegance.
With all due respect, statements like this have no more content than do statements like "You are a mind-numbed bush-bot" or "Bush lied, people died" or "Chimp-nazi haliburton blood-for-oil."
A lot of good conservatives have serious reservations about this pick. Calling them whiny babies is insulting and suggests that the best you have is silly, ad hominen attacks. Save them for Hillary.
At a minimum, this pick is problematic in the effect it is already having on the 2006 get-out-the-vote effort. I do a lot of recruiting in that regard and, if things continue the way they have been going since the Miers pick,I will have hundreds of fewer volunteers in my county in 2006 than I had in 2004. Maybe it can be repaired. Maybe not.
It didn't take rocket science to see this problem. I could have told you what a Miers pick would do before the pick. The base is bloody dispirited. You may call them whiny babies or chimp-nazis for all I care. But those whiny babies are the ones that will be walking precincts (or not) in 2006. RINO's, moderates, good government republicans, and fiscal Republicans do not walk precincts. Conservatives (with no adjectives) walk precincts.
It's not just the Miers pick. It's the Miers pick after five years of profligate spending, CFR, unfettered illegal immigration and the response to Katrina. The reaction amongst conservatives I have been talking to is about 50%, 'Why bother? It doesn't matter if we elect Republicans anyway. They take us for granted.' Regardless how we got here, the Miers nomination has touched a raw nerve in the base and pretending that only crybabies that have bad nerves would feel this way doesn't change that.
This president is having big problems right now. Ignoring the effect of his actions on his political base is symptomatic of those problems. Hurling personal insults at those who are going to be walking precincts (or not) in 2006 does not help our president. Some small effort by the white house to at least pretend it cares about the base would sure help my GOTV efforts right about now.
Yes, he would. That's what he promised, and Dubya is a stand-up guy whose word is his bond.
Yes yes, heaven forbid any Republican dare to voice an opinion that happens to vary from the party line. THAT, my friend, is how Democrats work. Anyone here has every right to speak their mind on a SCOTUS pick; your melodrama and name-calling is out of line.
MM
I am shocked! Shocked I tell ya, that the President is playing politics. It's almost as if he were a politician.