Bill's Notes

Interesting. Back in July I asked a local Penn Dutch guy to install a septic system on my investment property and to get the driveway permit, including putting in a few feet of driveway and clearing the sight lines. Haven't talked to him since.

Guess what? It's installed! Septic is in. Front of lot is cleared. Driveway is started.

Still haven't heard from him. I didn't call because the Dutch see that as "pesting" them. I heard about it from a local bartender. "Hey, didn't I see an excavator over at your property?"

There's no contract. Just a handshake after a short discussion. I suppose at some point he'll want some money. (I haven't given him a dime.) I hope this works out as planned. So far, so good. Keep fingers crossed.

You knew this post was coming down, didn't you?

Mebbe I'm just noticing this because I'm watching more network television shows (for the first time in almost a decade), but does it seem like there are a lot of scenes where women are hitting/beating up men? Even if the men are cops, other women cops are violent against them.

I understand the reasons from a writing perspective. Violence generates emotion, which encourages viewers to keep watching. And a way to establish a female character's toughness is to have her best a male physically. I saw one show on fox where about a 130-pound woman took down a 250-pound security guard in about a second. Whatever.

It just seems like there's a lot of it.

Plus, and this is an old complaint (ever since Jackie Gleason), men on television are usually idiots. Woman are smart and competent.

Perhaps that explains why I haven't watched network television regularly for years. I mean, like 1997, and that was just a drop by for a few months.

Can anyone else identify the song with these lyrics? It was on a tape left in my house in Peace Corps and contained no info as to song name or recording artist. I've never heard it anywhere else. It's kind of a misogynist song, regrettably, but it's got a catchy tune. Some selections I can remember:

"She was a bottle blonde bitch from Beaumont, Texas
With an Elvis tattoo on her solar plexus."

"She said, 'I'm too tired. I'm too stoned. I'm too stupid to leave the house.'"

"She was a perfectly good girl.
An all-day-on-the-phone kind of girl."


UPDATE: Okay, it might be "Too Tired" from The Cages. Question: What are the rest of the lyrics?

But it's important! Suffice to say that I've always been a hold-your-nose-and-support-the-frat-boy supporter of President Bush, but now he's gone too far. The only support he'll get is for the office he holds. But he can go screw off.

Here's what I want to happen:

1. Miers rejected by Judiciary Committee and Senate.
2. Justice O'Connor withdraws her resignation on grounds Bush is too incompetent to nominate a successor.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that for now.

Looks like I'll be working this weekend. Looks like I've got one of them jobs. I feel so "busy and important," to quote Bridget Jones.

I occasionally check to see what posts people are accessing from the archives. Over the past few weeks, in the course of looking at these past entries and accompanying reader comments, I've run into one obnoxious comment after another by J. Every comment was a put-down of one kind or another.

Love really blinds you. Glad she don't come 'round here no more. And that's all I have to say about that. (For now!)

She takes Bush to task:

Here are some maybes. Maybe the president has simply concluded he has no more elections to face and no longer needs his own troops to wage the ground war and contribute money. Maybe with no more elections to face he's indulging a desire to show them who's boss. Maybe he has concluded he has a deep and unwavering strain of support within the party that, come what may, will stick with him no matter what. Maybe he isn't all that conservative a fellow, or at least all that conservative in the old, usual ways, and has been waiting for someone to notice. Maybe he has decided the era of hoping for small government is over. Maybe he is a big-government Republican who has a shrewder and more deeply informed sense of the right than his father did, but who ultimately sees the right not as a thing he is of but a thing he must appease, defy, please or manipulate. Maybe after five years he is fully revealing himself. Maybe he is unveiling a new path that he has not fully articulated--he'll call the shots from his gut and leave the commentary to the eggheads. Maybe he's totally blowing it with his base, and in so doing endangering the present meaning and future prospects of his party.

David Frum concurs:

I have spent many hours of the past three days listening to conservative jurists on this topic - people who have devoted their lives to fighting battles for constitutionalism, for tort reform, for color-blind justice, people who fought the good fight to get Bork, Scalia, Thomas, and now Roberts onto the high Court.

Their reaction to the nomination has been almost perfectly unanimous: Disappointment at best, dismay and anger at worst. Here's the tough truth, and it will become more and more important as the debate continues: There is scarcely a single knowledgeable legal conservative in Washington who supports this nomination. There are many who are prepared to accept, reluctantly, as the president's choice. Some still hope that maybe it won't turn out as bad as it looks. But ask them: "Well what if the president had consulted you on this choice," and the answer is almost always some version of: "I would have thought he was joking."

Dubya is becoming a bitter joke on the right. Here's Michelle Malkin on Kelo:

I know what Janice Rogers Brown's views are on such matters: "Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government."

But what are Harriet Miers' views? Your guess is as good as mine.

This choice isn't good enough. The decision needs to be taken back — Miers herself should make that call — and be remade. If not, the decision needs to be defeated in the Senate so Dubya can have another try.

A guy named Daniel Flynn puts the sell-out in perspective. It is we conservative's own fault. We have looked away too long.

Principles lost are difficult to recover. After selling out our principles for the president's benefit, we now have the gall to accuse George W. Bush of selling us out? It's not difficult to understand why President Bush felt it politically safe to insult his base by nominating Harriet Miers: no consequences for past assaults on conservative principles results in future assaults on conservative principles. Fool us once, shame on the president. Fool us 137 times, shame on us.

Yup.

The Democrats lost to Bush twice!

You know what American politics is like. Remember those Harlem Globetrotters games? They used to play two teams as I recall: The Boston Shamrocks or the Washington Generals. Well, American politics is like watching the Generals play the Shamrocks. You keep expecting the Globetrotters to do something exciting, but they ain't there.

You know what really gets my goat about this nomination? The irony of it. We conservatives have been hoisted on our own petard.

My complaint about George W. Bush's selection of Harriet Miers is that it is an unserious nomination of a woefully unqualified person and the decision is rooted in cronyism. But Bill, I say to myself, you knew at the time that George W. Bush was an unserious nominee back in 2000, when the GOP Big Donors made him the presumptive choice before the primaries and rallied behind him in an effort to recapture the White House. And Bill, you knew that George is a man who has gotten almost everything in life through his personal connections. So of course Bush is going to act in an unserious way and reward friends, just as he's been rewarded.

I mean, I used to smugly tell people back during the Clinton administration, whenever this or that scandal broke out or we learned he was boffing the help, "We elected to the presidency the governor of Arkansas. Of course he's gonna poop on the furniture. He don't mean nothing by it. Just have the staff clean up the mess and it's best to pretend it never happened. Might embarrass the man."

So how did I miss that the same lesson about the frat boy ex-drunk son of privilege?

I guess I thought he'd learn. I thought he'd grow. And he has -- some. But not quite enough.

The sense from George Will and other serious conservatives is that this is a profoundly unserious pick. Bush doesn't realize that he has spent all his political capital with the conservative wing of the party. The spending, the signing of McCain-Feingold, and a host of other problems has cost him credibility.

This nomination is the 13th stroke of the clock. It calls into question not only itself, but everything that came before. Bush thought that his right flank was shored up. What he didn't realize is that we conservatives shared many of the concerns about Bush that our leftist colleagues do about him. Bush's difficulties articulating himself, for example, are embarrassing to all Americans. He seemed far too chummy with the Saudis in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, and that was demoralizing. He lacks the gravitas for the job. But we've tolerated him because we wanted one of our intellectual stars on the Supreme Court, and we figured he's the guy to make the appointment. We have the votes to confirm a Luttig, a Janice Rogers Brown, an Alito. We're eager for the discussion and the debate and think we can prevail both in the argument and in the court of public opinion. After all, we're right! We've been waiting for this moment for more than a decade. And then Bush shrinks from his duty.

George Will puts it best:

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court’s role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president’s choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends. [Emphasis mine.]

Some folks here at IndustrialBlog have suggested that conservatives are being used by corporatist Republicans. Just as the leftists are used by the Democratic Party. Clinton sold out the left, frequently. In fact, Clinton was a bit more conservative a president than Bush. That's why I thought it was stupid to keep attacking him. We were getting what we wanted. Clinton's triangulation policy simply allowed him to take credit for GOP policy victories.

The scary thing is Bush doesn't seem to know what he's done. His hastily called press conference yesterday only made matters worse. "Trust me?" Are you kidding?

This selection was, as George Will, a profoundly unserious pick. I don't care if Harriet Miers votes as I'd like. We're not selecting a representative of conservatism to the Supreme Court. We're selecting a justice, and that person should be qualified in constitutional jurisprudence. Harriet's not even a constitutional lawyer.

Defeat the nomination. Then perhaps in the next three years of this lame-duck presidency Congress can take the lead.

Dubya has betrayed conservatives. Just like his father.

I've carried a lot of water for Dubya, in the hopes that he would pick conservative stars for the Supreme Court. And then he acts like we have to be ashamed and hide in the darkness and sneak a stealth candidate through.

Was Clinton ashamed of Ginsburg? She was an ACLU attorney!

In Opinion Journal:

Ms. Miers would be well qualified for a seat on a court of appeals, where she could develop a grasp of all these important issues. She would then have to decide what role text and original meaning should play in constitutional interpretation in the context of close cases and very difficult decisions. The Supreme Court is no place to confront these issues for the very first time.

Still, it's the cronyism. The obvious personal favoritism. The contempt. The cowardice.

All evidence shows that Harriet Miers is a kiss-ass. This nomination is a victory for suck-ups everywhere. A "diversity" pick is bad enough; a reward for sycophancy is even worse.

I've given President Bush the benefit of almost every doubt. All in anticipation of these Supreme Court picks.

Roberts wasn't quite my guy, but he was furiously intelligent and extremely well-qualified. So I supported that pick.

But this one? I don't care if she votes correctly on everything. She's a mediocre pick. She's a kiss-ass.

I'm not sure we conservatives can shoot our own here. The Left may enjoy this moment, but if you don't join us in killing this selection, you may regret it. After all, Miers is probably very conservative. Gloat a bit (remember that I didn't post-election, though), but help us get rid of this pick and insist the president at least select someone with minimal qualifications.

This is the worst pick since the New York Jets selected Blair Thomas second in the 1990 NFL Draft. (Note: Emmitt Smith was selected 17th in that draft.) But at least the Thomas pick was understandable: Blair Thomas had outstanding credentials.

That damned dream! I don't want to talk about it.

I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar
She asks me if I'd beat her
She took me back to the Hyatt House...
I don't want to talk about it.
Warren Zevon, Poor Poor Pitiful Me.

President Bush is an idiot. There. I said it. He nominates someone with NO judicial experience for the Supreme Court.

I call bullshit. Harriet Miers should be turned down on principle. I'll support the defeat of her nomination.

UPDATE: I've looked around the blogosphere. It seems the words most often used are "underwhelmed" and "disappointed." How about "outraged"?

You leftists and liberals who read the blog: Give us some time. Part of the rules of political opposition is each party allows some time to "shoot their own." That's what we did with Trent Lott. My hope is we conservatives will shoot our own here. If we can't, join us in defeating the nomination. Force the president to send us a qualified nominee, one whom we can argue about on the merits.

Imagine the howls on the right if Bill Clinton had done something like this.

UPDATE: RedState.Org says it better here.

Many of the President's defenders would argue that Harriet Miers is like Chief Justice Rehnquist, in that she worked for a Presidential administration, but had no experience on the bench before becoming an associate justice. That ignores the fact that Chief Justice Rehnquist graduated first in his class at Stanford, clerked for Justice Jackson, and had a stellar career at the United States Department of Justice. Harriet Miers has nothing similar in her background.