Do you really, I mean REALLY, expect the current President of the United States to call a SITTING member of the US Supreme Court a mistake? You can't be serious. Talk about breaking every rule of decorum in the book, earning enemies left and right, setting bad precedent, and just looking tacky.
Bush is playing this like he should. Laugh off the stuff he knows he shouldn't talk about and nominating someone he believes he can trust.
Frankly, I like this pick more and more every day.
Hopefully Stephens or Ginsberg will exit, and then you all may have your Janice Rodgers Brown or Priscilla Owens.
You must be taking all the love from me, because the more I hear, the less confident that I am that she is "merely" a "like-for-like" replacement for O'Connor and not the proverbial "Souter in a skirt".
The current crop of Dems'n'RINOs needs to be voted out of office and replaced with Republicans with spines. After the '06 election, hopefully W will have two more shots at getting openly confirmable, non-stealthy conservatives on the court, but we'll first have to help get him more actual Republican senators into office.
If a SC nominee were successfully filibustered now, the Left (plus Arlen, too, I suspect) would try to bring back O'Connor back, and mount massive MSM support for that and subsequent SC-nominee filibustering, until the likes of another Kennedy--maybe even Patches--would be brought forward as W's "only option to break a stalemate."
One can act as if we're ready to die fighting for an Owens, but if we did die in that fight, "our children" would surely suffer because of it.
HF
If he doesn't have the stomach for it now, what makes you think he will have the stomach for it later?
I'm convinced after this week that Bush will never select someone of that quality. His views on the Constitution are quite different than most freepers unfortunately.