our side killed Miers, I cannot see how anyone could come to a different conclusion. the Dems opinion on Miers - pro or con - was meaningless.
Actually, Miers withdrew when it was clear she wasn't impressing anybody. When Specter and Leahy sent her questionare back, with Leahy saying it was the first time in his life he could remember a nominee failing their questionare, it was clear she wasn't coming up to speed. When every senator that met her came away unimpressed (except for Reid, who probably liked having someone he didn't feel inferior to), that told her things were going badly.
Of course "republicans" killed the nominee, we are the majority. But what killed her was that, as the facts were revealed, it was clear she needed to withdraw.
What killed the PORTS deal was a combination of things, none of which had to do with port security. By the end the number one complaint was that we shouldn't "REWARD" the country with the deal, as if running terminals in our ports is some great prize that we reserve for only the noblest of the noble.
The arguments at least had finally found a factual basis, although they were far removed from the initial complaints. "UAE doesn't recognize Isreal, they recognized the Taliban, they support they boycott, they don't vote with us in the U.N, they haven't been our friends long enough" -- these were the arguments that slowly replaced the lie "we can't give our ports away to terrorist countries like UAE", and the personal attack "You just can't trust muslims, you can't trust arabs, they are just out to get us, their religion teaches them to lie to us". While the real argument seemed to be "we have to seal our borders, and now we're going to do THIS?"
as one who wished our terminals were run by patriotic conservative-supporting american companies, it was hard to be on the side of the rule of law, and of free trade, against those who thought somehow stopping this one deal would make a bit of difference.
But given that the BIG argument was about whether Bush was selling out the country for his oil buddies, it seemed unfathomable that republicans would jump on that, given that Bush had to follow the law, that the law was followed, and it was unseemly to attack him for that, or to say (as so many did the first days) that the deal had not been reviewed.