Miers Withdrawal is a Major Political Defeat

I was blown over by the news this morning. This is a major political defeat for the president. Virtually every court watcher and Senate observer believed that if Bush stuck to his guns, the Republicans in the Senate would not hand their own C-in-C a massive defeat. He, and I mean by "he" Karl Rove, must have had no stomach for a fight. Why? The Plame-Leak CIA Grand Jury. That's right: after tomorrow's expected announcement of indictments, Bush and Rove may have found the Republican senators unwilling to go to the mat for him, or at least demanding, in return, a heavy price that he would have to pay (such as distancing himself from Rove, or even Cheney). Bush cannot be fighting the conservatives in his own party when he needs their support to call the indictments (a la Delay) "politically motivated." Since he can't fire the grand jury, he fired his other liability: Miers. Bush now has a carrot to offer his party for their support when his administration gets slammed by the grand jury: a nominee to their liking, a right-wing ideologue like Luttig, for example (the man who recently wrote that in the perman ent war against terrorism, there can be no limitations on the president's ability to lock up someone indefinitely, without trial, whom he accuses of being a member of Al Qaeda, including American citizens apprehended on American soil, i.e., you and me).

Personally, I think Miers should have refused to withdraw her nomination. She should have been self-interested and told W that he should be loyal to her, no matter what, as she had been to him all along. He said she was the "best qualified" person for the job, and she could have, and should have, made him stuck by it. In the end, I still believe that the Senate Republicans would not have dared defeat her nomination, and she would be on the court. If Miers remained the nominee, they would have confirmed her, and exacted as their price that Bush rid himself of the Plame Leak Scandal by ditching Scooter and Karl. And I think Bush would not have dared withdraw Miers against her will, because that would be even a graver defeat. In other words, Miers could have forced Bush to pick her over Rove. I'm sorry she didn't, for her sake.

FYI, a close relative in Dallas Miers fairly well, and they used to belong to a church together in the 1980s. According to this source, Miers helped out with a "no questions asked" STD clinic run by that church. Now she attends a more evangelical/fundamentalist church. But this relative says that Miers is every bit as intelligent and nice as we have been led to believe by Harry Reid. All moot now.