Thursday, October 27, 2005

Competence, Not Ideology

The Hotline has a good tick-tock of the withdrawal and Kos--Kos!--of all people has a good analysis of the situation:
It seems to me that Miers wasn't done in from a lack of conservative cred as the wingers want to believe. Bush was convinced she was like him and would've fought for her all the way through. She was done in from simple incompetence. Her responses to committee questions betrayed a complete lack of understanding of constitutional law. Her meager writings were incoherent. She was unable to articulate competence in meetings with senators.

Give Miers the same set of facts but with Judge Roberts' obvious competence on legal issues, and she gets confirmed. She wasn't done in because the crazies flipped. She was done in because she simply wasn't competent to sit on the High Court and it was so painfully obvious.

I point this out not to gloat or throw my lot in with Kos (clearly, I'm already there), but to mark this post for the future, since I suspect three weeks from now we'll be hearing left-wing charges about how the new nominee is just red-meat tribute being paid to the Right-Wing Extremists. Which just isn't true.

This was always about competence.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree Miers didn't convey competenace; however, it wasn't because she went to SMU. She would have been incompetent if she went to Stanford, Yale, Penn or Michigan. You don't seem to understand that as evidence of your SMU matters a little bit campaign.

Anonymous said...

kwawk,
Time to turn the page, my man. You lost.

Anonymous said...

Clearly, Anon 3:51 is an SMU alum. : )

Anonymous said...

Kwawk, I thought Bush lost that one debate too, I forget which one of the 3, but it was the one where the only thing anyone remembers is that Kerry was in favor of a "global test." Turns out I was wrong, Bush won it.

Kerry was in favor of global test (mostly one of popularity for him and Theresa in Paris). He still is. Oh, and he lost the biggest debate -- the one on election day.

Anonymous said...

"...three weeks from now we'll be hearing left-wing charges about how the new nominee is just red-meat tribute being paid to the Right-Wing Extremists. Which just isn't true."

It's funny to me - you're basically accusing the left of pre-judging the next nominee, but you're doing just that yourself, by asserting they won't be "red-meat".

BTW - I agree that Miers was a bad nomination because she wasn't qualified, but the reason she couldn't even get a hearing is because she was not "conservative" enough.

The Base would be happy to confirm a dog if George could train it to vote against Roe and birth control.