Harriet Miers and the Theater of the Absurd

Here's an inadvertently hilarious paragraph from a story about the Miers' nomination by Charles Savage in the Boston Globe :

"WASHINGTON -- Some of the advocacy groups that are concerned about Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers's lack of a record on social issues are favoring a new approach to thwarting her nomination: Asking the nominee, who has no judicial experience, complex questions about constitutional law...."

Imagine! Asking a nominee to the Supreme Court complex questions about constitutional law. The nerve.

I can't resist quoting the next paragraph:

"''We are trying to establish that there are thousands of questions that law students routinely deal with . . . and if she can't get to that level, it doesn't matter if you're for the left or the right, at that point it's a fait accompli that she is not fit for the office,' said Eugene DelGaudio, president of Public Advocate, a conservative profamily group."

Note that DelGaudio is from a conservative group....

Opposition to this nomination is reaching a critical mass; it's time for Miers to withdraw. She seems a perfectly decent, albeit grossly sycophantic, woman. She should get out while she still has some shred of a reputation intact. Otherwise, these angry, jilted conservatives are going to claw her to pieces.

There is one other possibility: that Miers' opponents have set the bar so low (surely the White House counsel can handle questions routinely debated by law students...right?) that she will benefit from excessively lowered expectations. I mean, she shows no signs of being a total idiot....