Conservatives Confront Bush Aides

By Aussiegirl

It is disappointing in the extreme, and also insulting to committed conservatives who are making objections to the nomination of Harriet Miers on the good-faith basis of her lack of credentials and experience, to be demagogued and attacked by the White House with what is normally a Democrat tactic -- attacking your opponents so-called "motives" instead of addressing the substance of the argument.

The White House has obviously ceded the ground of principle and fact and settled on the tactic of smear and intimidate. Since when was it "elitist" to expect and reward only the best? Or has affirmative action taken such hold of our party that the only qualifications for higher office are being a close friend of the president's, attending a non-Ivy League school or having the correct chromosome in one's genetic code?

Is Janice Rogers Brown, the daugher of a share-cropper, an "elitist" choice? Is Clarence Thomas an "elitist choice" because Thomas attended an Ivy League school? I find this disturbing in the extreme, as it smacks of the anti-intellectual pogroms of the Cultural Revolution in China and the tearing down of intellectuals generally in any closed society.

Furthermore, the bitter lesson that the Bush White House has now sent to all conservatives who labor in the bitter vineyards of liberal political correctness is -- keep your opinions to yourself, do not excel, make good political connections, do not rock the boat or by any means commit any of your deeply-held conservative opinions to paper if you ever aspire to sit on an appelate court. I simply do not understand how a person can achieve the ripe old age of 60 without ever uttering one word to anyone about their views on any important conservative or Constitutional issue. And how is that a glowing recommendation for sitting on the high court?

Much is now being made that "we must have one of the people represented on the court -- not one of them pointy-headed intellectuals." If Republicans now scorn the obvious powerhouse intellects of Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas with their words, we are in deep trouble. It is precisely that conservatives were promised, and fully expected someone of their caliber to be nominated that we are disappointed and outraged. Whatever her fine qualifications as a person and a lawyer, nothing in Harriet Miers' past suggests anything even remotely in their league.

Conservatives Confront Bush Aides: "The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin resume and that her selection -- Bush called her 'the best person I could find' -- was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers 'has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism.' Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but 'was talking more broadly' about criticism of Miers."