Oy Vey is Miers!

Salon.com News

"I picked the best person I could find." George W. Bush

Look at the president's face. Look at his new Supreme Court nominee. You gotta think to yourself, George Bush really is drinking again.

How else to explain this incomprehensible choice? In the wake of the FEMA, Katrina, Plame, Iraq--and now the DeLay--disasters, the guy's gasping in a desert of unpopularity, licking desperately at the watery dregs of public approval. So why would he choose someone even his own supporters can't swallow?

Maybe it's not about them, or us, or her ... maybe it's about him. The president is losing it. He needs someone who adores him, gives him unconditional love and awe, protects his increasingly fragile sense of control and command. And it seems with this president, that's always a woman. Mommy, Laura, Condi, Karen Hughes. And now Miers. His own lawyer.

"In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met," David Frum, National Review Online.

There you have it in a nutshell. She thinks he's brilliant. He thinks she's Supreme Court material. A match made in Hell. And the American people set up once again to get burned, but good.

Out of a potential pool of thousands of highly qualified jurists, scholars, deep thinkers, ideological giants of either party, the best he can find is a mediocre patronage flunky? God help us, the man's gone round the bend.

I'm serious. It's damn scary. Bush's choice is so flawed on so many levels, you honestly have to wonder how coherent his thinking could possibly be. No matter how many ways you try to spin this--he's going for safety, solidarity, non-controversy, a distraction, political cover--the fact remains that Harriet Miers is the X-factor in an insolvable equation.

And where are the savvy bean counters who usually keep such tight reigns on their skittish leader and his public actions? Why didn't they stop this travesty? We've heard Bush has a temper. A mean and intractable one when he's drinking. We can only imagine the tantrums echoing from the Oval Office as they tried to talk him down from this dangerous ledge.

But he jumped. This time without the parachute of political cover. His own party is so stunned they're letting him free fall. Oh wait, Orrin Hatch is on board. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. And I bet Bush doesn't either.

Bush loyalists in Congress have stood by their man as long as he espoused their own conservative right wing ideologies, even in the face of growing pressure from the opposition. But they've got to get reelected, and this inexplicable choice is going to be a hard sell to their own home bases.

It's clear from their thundering silence they haven't a clue how to do it. And that the only sound echoing through the halls of Congress at the moment is a giant collective OY!

Because the elephant in the room has finally landed on them.


PS Who is Harriet Miers? Dan Rubin of Blinq has collected as impressive a raft of info I've seen so far. Blinq: Bullish Supreme Choice