Posted on 07/24/2005 6:40:28 AM PDT by mathprof
PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.
When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."
[snip]
But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He's also a broken record:
Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not. The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.
Flo King said of Frank Rich that he's so sensitive that if he were the Titanic he would have apologized to the iceberg.
It makes sense for the replacement for Justice O'Connor to be confirmed by October, when the 2005 Term of the Supreme Court begins. The average time to confirm any Justice to the Court is 73 days. And Congress is currently on vacation. M\
Do the d*mned math you blithering bigot. To replace O'Connor by October, the nomination has to be made NOW, you childish twit. Unless you think that Bush engineered the retirement of O'Connor in order to carry out his nefarious plan, your infantile tantrum is so much cr*p, and no more.
Congressman Billybob
So, Frank, if the White House had waited an additional week to make the announcement, wouldn't it also have been "one of the hastiest court announcements in memory"? That takes some of the wind out of your bloviation, doesn't it?
Oh wow, the President moved quickly to handle a situation he's known was coming up for about 5 years. Surely a sign of panic and dark conspiracy.
Mr. Rich has a short memory:
1981 - O'Connor nominated 19 days after Justice Stewart's retirement announcement.Source1986 - Scalia nominated same day as Justice Burger's retirement announcement.
1987 - Bork nominated 5 days after Justice Powell's retirement announcement.
1990 - Souter nominated 2 days after Justice Brennan's retirement announcement.
1991 - Thomas nominated 4 days after Justice Marshall's retirement announcement.
Do you think Rich's faulty memory could be explained by partisanship?
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