It’s Simply Life

One of the best pieces I have read about the Miers debate from Varifrank:

I like George Will, I really do. But I find his final epistle to the conservative faithful regarding Harriet Miers to be the last piece of evidence I need to be sure that the President has made the right choice for the right reasons. Any decision that makes this many people in the chattering class froth at the mouth has got to be a good one.

Oh, and I just want to say that I found Mr. Wills statement that “The President has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. ” to be an insult on par with any slander handed by Moveon.org or from the desk of Howard Dean.

Mr. Bush may not have the background and the forethought or the critical thinking skills that would make Mr. Will swoon, but he has managed to do two things in his ?Flowers for Algernon? life that Mr. Will has not:

1) He managed to stop wearing bow ties when he started wearing pants that went all the way to the floor which was roughly the same time his mother Barbara stopped asking him to “put it on” for the annual family Easter photograph.

2) He became President by the largest number of votes cast for a candidate in history.

It is not up to east coast twaddle merchants like Mr. Will to determine ?what is and is not a conservative? and god help us all if we start looking that far to the east for guidance in that matter. Electoral leadership provided by these ?cool, cool conservative men? lead the Republican Party from disaster to disaster in election after election for almost three decades. It is also not up to Mr. Will to determine who is and who is not good enough to sit on the Supreme Court. That job dear sir is the Presidents, who then passes it on to the Senate for their approval, and thus by proxy the people of the United States. Mr. Will fits into neither of those roles, his vote and voice is no more or less than mine, and to that I can only say, ?thank god?.

The time to decide if Bush was up to the job of picking a Supreme Court Justice was last November, not this October. Shockingly, Mr. Will, Goldberg, Krystol and Bork all decided not to publish their collective ? Bush is a poor conservative and cant pick judges because he?s a big dumb hick evangelical from Texas and we all know what they are like don?t we?? posts back then where they could be assured that people would have listened and that President Bush would not return to a position where he could put his choices before the Senate for consideration.

The alternate universe points us to a world where instead of being forced to accept a choice from that inbred Texan, President Chimpy McHitler Jr; Messers. Will, Goldberg, Krystol and Bork would be writing Oped articles in support of President Kerry and his fabulously intelligent and oh so conservative choices for Supreme Court.

Oh, of course not. They would be screaming about how it is the end of America as we know it, and what?s worse, they would probably be blaming it all on the failed Bush campaign that doomed the Republican party and the country into a new Liberal dark age. There is just no pleasing some people.

Gentleman – and all the rest of you who are so up in arms about the end of the world; which has been brought on by the oh so horrid nomination of Harriet Miers, I have to remind you of something simple and basic on our daily lives. This world is not a perfect world, It?s not Heaven that has fallen, its not Hell that has risen, its simply life. Some of it is good, and some of it is bad, if you live long enough you learn to roll with the punches and not be surprised when things don?t necessarily go your way. Despite what you may think and wish, It?s not all about you.

You will not get everything you want in this life, but you?ll find sometimes, you get what you need.

No ?Conservative? pundit has explained to me where the votes are going to come from to get the kind of candidates they say are ?so much better? than Harriet Miers. Mr. Bush has always had to deal with a Senate that is far from Conservative and barely Republican. That?s a fact, and knowing that fact, it changes your approach as President when it comes to dealing with the nomination process. Try to remember that there is not an infinite amount of time in which to engage in these esoteric conversations about ?who should and should not be on the court? at any point in the term of office. Every man hour spent on this task is a man hour from something, dare I say, more important, like keeping Iran from flipping the oil markets into the Euro to the devastation the American economy.

Given the Presidents record on judicial choices, at all levels, I see a regular and repeated record of solid choices, they have been and continue to be, dare I say it, good conservative choices. I also voted for him in November. So what would I be saying about who I am if I suddenly jumped off my sofa, stood in the window and shouted; ? I want to end it all, my President betrayed me!!? and then threatened to jump because I didn?t get my way on this nomination? Would Mr. Will say I was a real conservative for feeling his outrage?

Way more where that came from….I give it a 10.0.

He also make a great point in the comment section of the post:

Some people believe that a Supreme Court Justice must be the very best and most learned scholar with loads of judicial background in order that they may be able to understand the intricacies of the document.

Other people believe that the document is simple and straightforward and more to the point was designed specifically to be read and understood by the average citizen.

I am of the latter camp. I believe it is fundametnally dangerous for our republic to begin to fall into the trap that says that only a small number of the very smartest people are capable of interpreting the law. It is a very short step from that idea to the idea that these people are in fact the law itself. If that were to happen, what kind of democracy do we have. We are dangerously close to that time already, there are those who believe that all that stands between ourselves and disaster is who sits on the Supreme Court. Well, I say “baloney”. If we find ourselves demanding the the Justices of the Supreme Court must have “super powers”, then we give credence to the idea of legislature by judicial fiat. We give credence to the idea that some men are better than other men. If however, the supreme court is simply another function of the constitutional system by which we all operate than it can be said to be no more powerful than the Legislature or the Executive Branch.

Harriet Miers, is no scholar on the law. She is a citizen who has the ability to speak bilingually between the normal language of every day people and that obscure language used only by lawyers. Harriet Miers does not come from a Ivy League college, she comes from the South. Harriet Miers has worked most of her life, not as a lawyer but as a business manager and partner.

In the context of my model of “the two camps”, I find all of these attributes to be acceptible for a candidate of the Supreme Court, in fact I find them to be desireable.

I believe it is more important for this President to pick someone he knows, someone he trusts to do the right thing,who believes in the same things as he does instead of a “super-hero” intellectual. We have seen how well some of those kind of picks have gone.

Just amazing to me how quick Conservatives are abandoning this President. It’s actually quite embarrassing really, loyalty was instilled in me from a very young age in the Marine Corps and to see the way some Conservatives are piling on Bush when he needs their support the most is just plain embarrassing. Where is your faith?

It’s actually quite embarrassing really, loyalty was instilled in me from a very young age in the Marine Corps and to see the way some Conservatives are piling on Bush when he needs their support the most is just plain embarrassing. Where is your faith?

Curt

See author page