Brendan Nyhan

According to the New York Times, a majority of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee question the choice of Harriet Miers. A number of prominent conservative pundits are up in arms. And Jeff Sessions, at least, appears to be pressing the panic button on the nomination:

Asked if the debate had become “one-sided,” with too few defending Ms. Miers, Senator Sessions, the Alabama Republican, struggled for words, then pushed a button for a nearby elevator in the Capitol building and told an aide, “Get me out of here.”

If it were me, I’d run too.

With apologies to Chris Rock, the problem with the Fitzgerald investigation is simple: liberals are too happy, conservatives are too mad.

Liberals are thrilled that the Bush administration is under the gun, to the point of celebrating the expected indictments that the special prosecutor may issue as soon as next week as “Fitzmas”. The phrase “Grab the popcorn” is also making the rounds.

Meanwhile, conservatives like Jeffrey Bell and William Kristol are issuing disingenuous defenses of potentially illegal acts as an attempt to “criminalize” conservatism.

But the whole point is this: we don’t know if anyone broke the law. Just because Ken Starr leaked everything that came through his office doesn’t mean that we have a complete picture of the Fitzgerald investigation. Liberals are celebrating prematurely; likewise, conservatives are denouncing the investigation way too soon. That’s why I don’t write much about this subject. We just don’t know anything — it’s all speculation, hearsay, and leaks.

As Matthew Yglesias wrote on Tuesday in responding to Jacob Weisberg:

Evidence hasn’t emerged because Patrick Fitzgerald hasn’t made any charges public or revealed what evidence he may or may not have to support those charges. It would convenient for us in the commentariat if he’d been running a sloppy investigation full of grand jury leaks giving us more juicy nuggets to chew over, but the Ken Starr precedent aside that’s not what prosecutors are supposed to do. If Fitzgerald’s charges, when they emerge, prove to be trumped-up, overblown, or unsupported by the evidence then naturally it would make sense to start condemning him. But concluding that his case is bogus before we see his evidence because we haven’t seen his evidence would be bizarre.

The opposite also applies. Concluding that the case is legitimate and worth prosecuting just because Fitzgerald continues to gather testimony is also bizarre. Let’s not jump the gun here.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has written a devastating profile of Patrick McHenry, a young Republican Congressman who is the prototypical foot soldier of the Rove-DeLay-Norquist machine. It’s all worth reading, but this paragraph below is yet another window into the ugly training in smear politics that College Republicans gives future party elites:

The College Republicans have legendarily been the starting point, the training and networking ground, for the careers of all of the party’s most influential activists: Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove. And producing Roves and Atwaters, tactical geniuses and election-winners, is exactly what the organization is set up to do: The organization is a four-year crash course in how to win votes from conservatives, in electioneering, with its members running endlessly for College Republican state board, College Republican state treasurer, College Republican national committee. There’s a balls-out element to these contests, to the infighting; when I talked to College Republicans in North Carolina, I heard constant, ridiculous allegations thrown at rivals within the organizations. This rival had an illegitimate son in Tennessee, that one paid for an abortion for some poor girl from Missouri. When I asked an innocent question about a network of political consultants in Raleigh, one College Republican stopped me immediately: “Surely you must have heard,” he said ominously, his drawl thick, “about them bisexual orgies.”

Later, the smears continued during the recent leadership fight within the organization:

At the convention, things got competitive, then grotesque. Convention speakers were deleted out of the program at the last minute, replaced by figures who supported Gourley. Delegations switched allegiances for mysterious reasons in the dead of night; virtually everybody accused virtually everybody else of being gay. As The New Republic’s Franklin Foer reported in a recent account of the CRNC convention, the Gourley-Davidson contest began in earnest after Norquist reminded delegates from the podium that “there are no rules in a knife fight.”

(For more on the ugliness of the College Republicans, see this post.)

Via Kevin Drum, Byron York quotes an anonymous conservative strategist slamming Harriet Miers:

The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings.

But she’s a good bowler! Remember, Bush can still take my advice and make her press secretary…

Jon Chait is saying what needs to be said about conservative outrage over the sexism/elitism charges the White House is directing at critics of Harriet Miers:

Conservatives certainly have a right to be outraged. After all, they oppose Miers on the basis of her lack of qualifications and suspect ideology, not her sex. But there is something comical about their shock. After all, Bush administration officials and their allies in Congress have been using this same technique on the Democrats for years — and the conservatives in the party never saw fit to object.

Virtually every time the Democrats objected to one of Bush’s judicial nominees, the president’s allies accused them of discrimination…

The Republican Party has adopted the hair-trigger racial sensitivity of a campus diversity activist, except that its motivation is cynicism rather than genuine left-wing ideological fanaticism.

It’s funny that conservatives never objected to these smears when they were being deployed against the left, and even participated on occasion. In fact, they sometimes piled on themselves. (“Senate Democrats are blocking [Owen’s] nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female,” wrote National Review Editor Rich Lowry last spring.) For some reason, they must have thought they could go after a Bush nominee and be spared its standard operating procedure for squashing judicial dissent. It’s not the first time they misjudged this administration.

Jason Reifler points me to some fishy-sounding Bush administration “errors”, which just happen to make the Medicare prescription drug benefit sound more appealing:

Information issued by the government, while generally accurate, tends to give an upbeat assessment of the new benefit, emphasizing the advantages. But the new program is so complex that the government, by its own account, has made two significant errors in explaining it to the public.

Federal health officials incorrectly described the standard minimum drug benefit in an advertisement that appeared on Sept. 25 in Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement with a circulation of more than 37 million. In addition, the official Medicare handbook, sent to all beneficiaries, significantly overstates the number of prescription drug plans that will be available without any premiums for low-income people.

The Bush administration has notified Congress of the errors and says they will be corrected in future brochures and on the Medicare Web site.

Oops, they did it again.

Marshall Sella has a fascinating profile of Cameron Diaz in this month’s issue of GQ. To counter the pathological nature of celebrity journalism, Diaz insisted that the story allow her to respond midstream:

The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near enough, this is it. And she has a few salient points to make about celebrity journalism. So the idea (her idea) is as follows: We’ll spend some time together, and I’ll write it up. Then she’ll elbow me off the page and respond — busting me if I’ve misquoted her, addressing the strangeness of having the media create an omnipresent “Cameron Diaz” persona, and in general conveying what it’s like to have your life turned into a weekly, wildly overpublicized sem-fictional soap opera. After that, bringing a knife to a gunfight, I’ll respond to her response. And so on, back and forth.

And it works — Sella’s article helps us understand Diaz in a way that is impossible in the traditional semi-fictionalized format of glossy magazine profiles. Politicians and political journalists, take heed!

George W. Bush on Harriet Miers:

Asked point-blank whether she was the most qualified person in the country to serve on the high court, Bush said, “Yes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have put her on.”

The New Republic on Harriet Miers:

Let’s take as the standard, then, arguably the least qualified justice currently on the Court: Clarence Thomas. Thomas went to Yale Law School, served as the assistant attorney general of Missouri, held a variety of civil rights posts in the Reagan administration, and spent a year on the D.C. federal appeals court before he was nominated for the Supreme Court. Miers, on the other hand, has a law degree from Southern Methodist University, went on to head the Texas bar association, and held the high office of chairman of the state lottery commission. Does Clarence Thomas know anything about bingo? We think not.

On Sunday, the New York Times printed an interview with Barbara Boxer that included this passage about her forthcoming novel on Washington politics:

Q: But how can you say that “A Time to Run,” your first novel, represents the world of Washington politics when the Democratic characters are portrayed as saints, the Republicans as snakes?

BOXER: Let the reader judge. I come to the book with a point of view. But my characters, I believe they’re multidimensional.

Q: What about Greg, who becomes an operative for a wealthy Republican businessman and tries to destroy the career of a Democratic congressman who was his friend in college? Do you think Democrats are just more virtuous than Republicans?

BOXER: As individuals? No. But as parties, I think the Democrats have virtuous goals.

Today, a Washington Times article about Boxer’s book draws on the Times interview, but carefully quotes around Boxer’s statement that individual Democrats are no more virtuous than Republicans:

Sen. Barbara Boxer’s debut novel has yet to be published, but it already has created a dark and stormy night for Republicans. They’re mostly villains in “A Time to Run,” a suspense tale penned by the California Democrat.

The New York Times questioned Mrs. Boxer’s portrayal of Republicans as “snakes” and Democrats as “saints” in the book, which chronicles the adventures of a diminutive redhead who assumes her husband’s Senate seat after he is killed, then tries to foil the nomination of a conservative woman to the Supreme Court.

…In an interview with the Times on Sunday, however, Mrs. Boxer acknowledged writing the book “with a point of view,” adding that as a party, the “Democrats have virtuous goals.”

Mrs. Boxer told Publishers Weekly last month that her novel was “definitely a struggle between liberals and conservatives, and knowing that I wrote the book, you can imagine who wins the day.”

(Note: See my Spinsanity column on the NEA/9-11 myth for more on the nation’s most dishonest newspaper.)

Yes, the Associated Press is reporting on the contents of Karl Rove’s garage. Weep for our civilization (via Drudge):

He is “the architect” who steered George W. Bush to victory four times, twice as Texas governor and twice as president.

But can Karl Rove organize his own garage? Can the master of Bush’s political planning figure out where to put the ladders, paint cans and cardboard boxes?

Rove’s wife, Darby, raised the white garage door one morning last week to show journalists outside the million-dollar brick home that the deputy chief of staff, assistant to the president and senior adviser wasn’t home. All the interest came on the eve of his testimony Friday before a grand jury investigating who in the White House might have revealed the identity of a CIA operative.

There was no car in the garage. And the stuff left behind turned out not to be much different from what gathers dust inside most American garages.

Fascinating! And yes, there’s a picture of the inside of the garage:

Apparently, the AP has taken a page from US Weekly. Coming soon: Pictures of Karl Rove taking out the trash!