You gotta admire the ruthlessness of the cons. Just take Miers outside, explain to her how its gonna go down, and bang! Over. Now watch for the crazy they appoint in order to appease the far right (constitution in exile, anyone?)
In choosing a replacement for Ms. Miers, President Bush should not reward the bad behavior of his right wing base. He should reject the demands of a few extremists and choose a justice who will protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.
Appease the far right ? I thought that you considered people like Dobson to be part of the far right. Last I heard, he seemed to be fairly supportive of Miers. Or, do you just consider all that disagree with you part of the far right ?
Oh, come on, JD.
Who do you think has been calling for the Miers nomination to be withdrawn?
Trevor;
KBH has always been a wind-up toy. She threshes her wheat using the prevailing winds as anyone who wants to move up in the GOP hierarchy must.
The fact she is a woman just handicaps her that much more in the eyes of the Dons who rule the party.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison R-TX, a member of the Republican leadership said on MSNBC that she fully supported the Miers nomination and pronounced the hapless White House Counsel qualified. A lawyer for thirty years and a former president of the Dallas and Texas Bar Associations, Miers was eminently qualified to ascend to the Supreme Court having led a 400-person corporate law firm. Miers was ruthless pilloried in the most sexist fashion I ve ever seen. Hutchison should have been cutting asses every week in conference and publicly on the floor of the Senate to keep her brethren in line. It just goes to show how useless a Republican woman is, even when she is in the leadership of her party. She can never be counted on to stand up and defend a moderate female nominee unless she satisfies the patriarchal right wing fanatics in the Senate GOP conference. Senator Specter is correct when he points to the unfairness of the process thus far and the unwillingness of the GOP Conference to give the woman a chance. The pious hypocrites are only willing to give somebody an up or down vote if they are a reactionary wing nut.
Dobson is the far right. National Review is the far right. They work together, but their motivations differ. Six of one, half dozen of cons.
Semanticleo,
It is a shame because Kay has some moderate tendencies that don’t play out that often. She stood up and voted no on granting the General responsible for the tailhook scandal his four star retirement. I’ve heard and read the speculation that Kay wants to be President or Governor of Texas. Kay would make a good chief executive. Her adoption of a baby in her late fifties permanently forecloses that option. Having said all of that, I must acknowledge that more often than not, she has been a willing shill/tool of the right on numerous occasions the most obnoxious of which, is the appointments of Pricilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown who are two of the most reactionary female impersonators ever put forward for judicial appointment by a GOP President. I really don’t understand how any of the so-called moderate pro-choice women of the GOP conference voted for those two right-wing Trojan horses.
He’s talking about those dirty “obstructionists” who wouldn’t give Ms. Meirs the up-or-down vote she deserved unless the White House provided more information.
President Bush should not reward the bad behavior of his right wing base.
WTF? The bad behavior of the right wing base? What is he talking about?
What is he talking about?
Elephant? What elephant?
Semanticleo,
What is puzzling to me is why the Democrats on Judiciary, knowing full well that this is the best nominee that the administration was ever going to put forward, insisted on probing the documents of the White House counsel’s office for an “understanding” of the nominee’s record. This White House was implacably opposed to revealing anything significant because of the scrutiny it faced from the Independent Counsel. The Supreme Court s significance in safeguarding the right to choose and guaranteeing equal opportunity by sustaining Affirmative Action on life support is far more important in the general scheme of things than hanging back and watching the right wing beat up on their President. It seems incredibly shortsighted to allow this nomination to fail based on far right carping given the enormity of what is at stake.
Trevor;
You have a great deal more understanding of the woman than I. As for your dismay at how GOP moderates who are pro-choice can vote as they have, it is simple, yet complex
As I have said on numerous occasions, a person, or a group’s strength taken to extremes, becomes a weakness.
Democratic strength resides in fierce autonomy. Republican merit lies in unity. Both qualities become weakness when they are used manically, rather than thoughtfully.
Blending unity and autonomy is an art form, not a science.
You’re absolutely right, OW.
Bush’s next pick will be interesting and perhaps terrifying.
He got his backside handed to him by the far-right wing of his party. The only question left is how much does he grovel to them? Do they get their Thomas?
http://middleamericachronicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/so-long-harriet-miers.html
What’s puzzling to me is that you think Arlen Specter is a Democrat. He’s the guy who runs Judiciary, and he’s the one who said the White House would have to cough up.
I apologize for some of the more vitriolic language I just posted. I cannot talk about Janice Rogers Brown without extreme emotion. I wrote that some months ago, but it still reflects how I feel. I shall more carefully edit and review next time. The emotions are very raw for me when I think about the constitutional rights at stake in the next nomination. The thought of a reactionary nominee whether they be male or female impersonator sends me into a pure rage. Again, I apologize if I have offended anyone. I love good debate and sometimes get carried away.
In reality it was two GOP Senators (Lightintheloafers Graham (Repug-SC) and Sam ‘troglodyte’ Brownback (Repug-Jesusland)) who demanded to see the WH documents.
I really have to laugh. When Miers name was first floated, all the left did was squeal like stuck pigs about her being a CRONY!!! along with other choices names like “sycophant”, “boot licker” and “Bush idolater.”
Many conservatives meanwhile, questioned her qualifications and whether she had the bonafides to be a Supreme Court Justice.
She wasn’t and now it’s supposedly the fault of the “far right.”
Cripes, you people are more transparent than a ghost.
Pricilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown who are two of the most reactionary female impersonators ever put forward for judicial appointment by a GOP President.
Female impersonators? Janice Rogers Brown is a single mother. She’s the daughter of a sharecropper. Her inspiration to become a lawyer was that of Fred Gray, a civil rights attorney that represented both Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. When her husband died of cancer, she was forced to complete college and law school while raising her son.
My guess is, you haven’t been able to accomplish a scintilla of what she has. In fact, judging from your juvenille diatribe, I’ll bet money you couldn’t name a single case she has ruled on. You, like almost every other person who spouts such vitriol is reciting left wing loon talking points.
Jay C,
In case you’ve forgotten, this country was founded on one principle that has endured through the ages, it is white supremacy. Despite the educations and jobs we’ve accumulated, none of that was possible without a bloody and protracted struggle that loons like Janice Rogers Brown are fond of forgetting. I refuse to forget because on one beautiful afternoon at my grandmother’s house she dispassionately told me how a group of white boys castrated her brother for fun. She told me how she ran screaming to get him help and how he looked like he had been dipped in blood up to his chest. It’s one thing to watch “Roots”, or “Glory”, or “Rosewood”, its quite another thing to be told that someone in your family was an innocent victim of an incomprehensible act of racial violence. My daddy’s side of the family is from Alabama, the Montgomery area, one county north of Crenshaw county where Janice Rogers Brown was born in the town of Luverne in 1949. My father, David Wells, was born in Montgomery 3 years later. Janice Rogers Brown’s family and mine fled this area around the same time in the 50’s Why you ask? Perhaps the fact that 46 people had been lynched in a 20 year period before 1921 had something to do with the oppression they felt and the urgency to leave. Three of the lynched were black women. Forty One brothers lost their lives and two whose race researchers couldn’t determine died at the hands of white lynch mobs. This area includes Butler, Coffee, Covington, Crenshaw, Lowndes, Montgomery and Pike Counties. These people have names, faces, and families who mourned their loss and were embittered by their deaths. We collectively spit on the graves of these people when we lift up race traitors like Janice Rogers Brown, a hankerchief head nigger if their ever was one.
The names of the lost are listed here:
http://people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/HAL%20Web%20Page.htm
“The lynching era encompasses roughly the five decades between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Depression. During these years we may estimate that there were 2,018 separate incidents of lynching in which at least 2,462 African-American men, women and children met their deaths in the grasp of southern mobs, comprised mostly of whites. Although lynchings and mob killings occurred before 1880, notably during early Reconstruction when blacks were enfranchised, radical racism and mob violence peaked during the 1890s in a surge of terrorism that did not dissipate until well into the twentieth century” (17).
“In addition to the punishment of specific criminal offenders, lynching in the American South had three entwined functions:
first, to maintain social order over the black population through terrorism;
second, to suppress of eliminate black competitors for economic, political, or social rewards;
third, to stabilize the white class structure and preserve the privileged status of the white aristocracy” (18-19).
“Lethal mob violence for seemingly minor infractions of the caste codes of behavior was more fundamental for maintaining terroristic social control than punishment for what would seem to be more serious violations of the criminal codes” (19).
& Of these black victims, 94 percent died in the hands of white lynch mobs. The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob”
-From Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930
It is patently ridiculous to me why any self respecting Black man or Woman would question the insanity of Janice Rogers Brown, she doesn’t believe in Affirmative Action for anyone but herself. We were a people enslaved, degraded and brutalized by the most oppressive racial oligarghy the world has yet produced but she doesn’t believe in remedying housing discrimination, job discrimination, sexual harassment or even believe in social security or the minimum wage. She has ruled it is acceptable for employers to shout racial epithets at people in the workplace. She belives the shit is free speech. Yet try and call her a nigger and you’ll find your black ass in jail for threatening a judge.
Alabama only in the twenty first century deleted prohibitions in it s constitution to interracial marriage and failed to repeal a prohibition against integrated public schools and this bitch still doesn t see any basis for Affirmative Action? Is white supremacy so embedded in our public discourse and political ideology that we rationalize its pernicious existence? Or, is this bitch simply crazy? I wish I could force Janice Rogers Brown to look at the charred bodies of lynch mob victims burned alive, or the naked and castrated remains of our ancestors and then tell me there is no rational basis for Affirmative Action programs given the history of oppression in this country. I wish I could force her to look into the eyes of college educated black people denied the right to vote in Alabama by white illiterates because they couldn t answer some bullshit about how many bubbles are in a bar of soap. I want her to tell my 72 year old grandmother who saw her brother castrated for fun by some white boys that black people no longer suffer economic, political, educational and deleterious health effects as a result of white privilege.
White writer Kendall Clark believes, “White America’s attitudes about race and racism are a mixture of self-congratulation and defensiveness — “Yes, we’ve had some episodes of racism and bias, but that’s all clearly in the past.” But, in truth, White racism hasn’t gone anywhere. Its tenor and tone have mutated; it’s now expressed in carefully coded messages rather than in crudely overt themes. White racism — and the White supremacist ideology it reflects and networks of White privilege it maintains — are alive and well.The oppressive ideal is for privilege to be so deeply embedded and entwined in the social order that it’s hard to see and, thus, hard to fight. One way that White privilege has been made invisible is the creation of a widely shared sense of aggrieved White victimhood. If White people are victims of, say, affirmative action’s so-called reverse racism, the real claims of people of color and of women will make little sense. False claims of oppression dilute the force of real claims. White aggrieved victimhood is a smoke screen for White privilege.”
Y’all can believe what you want to believe about Janice Rogers Brown, just remember that the racists that support her neo confederate ideology can tell no difference between you or me and that as long as someone like her or Clarence Thomas has the enormous power of a federal judgeship at their disposal, everything you have or wanted to have for yourselves, your children, and your families is at risk
I really have to laugh. When Miers name was first floated, all the left did was squeal like stuck pigs about her being a CRONY!!! along with other choices names like sycophant , boot licker and Bush idolater. >>
I think it was not the squealing of the left, but the shrill demands of the right that led to Miers withdrawing herself. You only have to read her love notes to Bush to realize she is a Bush idolater. None of the charges you list above are incorrect. Her involvement in Bush cronyism is a legitimate reason to vote her down, as is her lack of qualifications.
Let’s see if I have this right. On Planet Jay, Miers was smeared by lefties, but right wingers took a good hard look at her qualifications.
Is that really you, Jay? Or is someone doing a bad impersonation?
When Dobson said he had talked to Karl Rove, and he was comfortable with Miers, the moonbats were howling at the moon. Now, he is responsible for her withdrawing her name from consideration?
No up or down vote ?! Are you out of your mind? She withdrew before she ever made it to a hearing. What Republican filibustered her?
National Review is the far right ? Surely you jest. Actually, the more you speak the more it is evident that you consider the far right to be anybody that does not vote Democrat.
What was this character assassination and shrill demands of the radical right wing that you moonbats keep harping on? Asking questions about whether or not she was qualified? Whether she was one of the best 50, 100, 200 conservative legal minds available? Having questions about the specific words and positions she took in the past? This is now somehow wrong ? Clearly, you are just upset because you did not get your Souter again. Sorry.
That is a difficult concept to grasp since your definition of far right seems to include every Republican.
Frankly, I did not like the fact that she came from the inside either. Made those crony charges seem to be more plausible.
But, unqualified ? Not according to the Constitution. Was she the best available? Clearly not, but that is not ever the standard for filling a job position.
Jay, she was an unqualified crony but the far right knifed her for not being hard right enough.
Please try to fit that in yer brain.
Trevor,
Nice diatribe!!
I was a big fan of your father when he pitched for the Yankees.
DOWN WITH UNCLE TOMS!!!
rightisright:
Thanks.
Dad is not a baseball player. The only thing he ever pitched was me and my mother.
Trevor,
Thanks for the history (?) lesson…
This has what to do with Judge Brown.
Besides, the next nominee is Samuel A. Alito, Jr
I was right again.