[Mb-civic] The Right, on Fire Over Miers - Colbert I. King - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Right, on Fire Over Miers

By Colbert I. King
Saturday, October 8, 2005; Page A21

At first I didn't know what to think about President Bush's nomination 
of White House counsel Harriet Miers to be an associate justice of the 
Supreme Court. She certainly was not among the people that I expected 
Bush to select for the high court. But then conservative commentators 
and columnists -- bless their hard-wired hearts -- came down on Miers 
like tons of bricks in free fall. Thus I was visited with the following 
revelation: If Miers is capable of causing the right to weep, wail and 
gnash its teeth, she can't be all bad.

They certainly are showing her no mercy. Treatment once reserved for 
those of progressive political persuasions is being directed toward her. 
You know the kind of attention I mean: belittling her qualifications, 
putting down her accomplishments, ascribing values to her that are all 
out of proportion to known facts, deriding her as a crony and 
diversity's child -- an affirmative action baby, so to speak.

Lest the conservative descent into classism go too far, however, it's 
worth bearing in mind that televangelist Pat Robertson is a 1955 
graduate of Yale Law School. 'Nuff said? Well, not quite. Miers hasn't 
even completed her round of grip-and-grin sessions on Capitol Hill and 
Bush's conservative base -- at least those among the pontificating class 
-- is having at her as if she's Justice David Souter in drag.

But it's not just the right that's revolting (and in more ways than 
one). Journalists are flyspecking her religion as if how and where she 
worships contains valuable clues about how she might rule on abortion or 
other issues that stir the souls of the political right and left. "Her 
abiding faith in Jesus" and membership in a church where she was 
baptized as an adult may have shaped her personal values, The Post 
reported this week. Duh. That statement could also be applied to 
millions of other Christians in this country, from Catholics and 
Episcopalians to Baptists and Pentecostals.

This may put me outside of the journalists' club, but plumbing the 
pamphlets and literature in Miers's Valley View Christian Church in 
Texas and conducting interviews with its members for insight into her 
personal views takes me, both as a consumer of news and as a 
co-religionist, to a place I need not go. I would just as soon wait for 
the public hearings, at which a duly sworn Miers can speak for herself.

Would that her problems were all from the right and the media, though. 
In the eyes of some of my friends on the ideological left, a Bush 
nominee is by definition one who will lead the court on a forced march 
back into the past. To them and to all who regard Miers's possible 
elevation to the Supreme Court as a dramatic and irreversible change in 
the country's direction, I humbly offer this thought: Chill. Turn down 
the apocalyptic rhetoric.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/07/AR2005100701650.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051008/bd37388b/attachment.htm