Month: October 2005
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The bottling up hypothesis
Why did President Bush’s presidency seem to implode over the last six weeks or so? I think one factor hasn’t been given adequate attention: 9/11. By pushing his approval ratings up so high, it muted Democratic opposition to Bush until late 2003, bottled up virtually all conservative dissent through 2004, and warded off any serious
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The significance of the Miers nomination
Before the Alito slugfest kicks into high gear, it’s worth taking a step back and considering how the failure of the Miers nomination will shape the future of the Court. Two points stand out. First, as William J. Stuntz argued on The New Republic Online, “Harriet Miers is to the Supreme Court what Dan Quayle
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“Scalito” for SCOTUS
Bush runs back to his base: [Samuel Alito] has been nicknamed “Scalito” for his ideological similarity to United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Will this cause a nuclear option showdown? That’s the biggest question here. The end of the filibuster could completely change the Senate.
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Pete Williams: A walking conflict of interest
Can you blame the public for not trusting the media when you read things like this? Because the case involves the intersection of politics and the press, the day sometimes had a hall-of-mirrors element. At one point, Mr. Cheney’s onetime press secretary, Pete Williams of NBC News, asked Mr. Fitzgerald how the prosecutor could take
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Scooter Libby: Sycophant
Yikes: “When I find a time when I disagree with Dick Cheney, I say to myself, ‘Why am I wrong?’” Mr. Libby said in an interview in 2001. Let’s just say that Libby doesn’t seem like a man who goes out on a limb without his boss’s approval.
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Heterodoxy on National Review!
The editors of National Review are, surprisingly, speaking truth to power rather than recycling GOP talking points: Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the
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Bush nominee under fire for attacks on media
Oh, how things have changed in the last year. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a Bush administration nominee is under fire for demagogic claims that the media is helping Al Qaeda: The senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee vowed Tuesday to defeat President Bush’s choice for chief Pentagon spokesman, citing
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What is Daniel Henninger talking about?
The first three paragraphs of Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal column today are mesmerizing in their incoherence: Here’s my guess why the President pulled Harriet. It was past midnight. In the wee a.m. hours Wednesday the President was up past his bedtime. The First Lady was asleep. He had just watched the Astros go down
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The AP on the state of the Bush presidency
Here’s a devastating little Associated Press summary of the political situation faced by the President: Bush, beset by poor poll ratings, an unpopular war in Iraq, high energy prices and the possibility of indictments of White House officials, offered no hint about his thinking on a new nominee. He pledged to make an appointment in
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Miers falls on her sword
First Jeff Sessions, now Harriet Miers: President Bush on Thursday accepted the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, according to a statement from the White House. In the statement, Miers said her nomination presented a “burden for the White House.” Miers, the White House counsel, was nominated earlier this month by President Bush to