Neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer has a message for the Bush administration: withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers.

When in 1962 Edward Moore Kennedy ran for his brother’s seat in the Senate, his opponent famously said that if Kennedy’s name had been Edward Moore, his candidacy would have been a joke. If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.

We’ve had quite enough dynastic politics over the past decades. (Considering the trouble I have had with Benjamin and William Henry Harrison, I pity the schoolchildren of the future who will have to remember who was who in the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidential alternations from 1989 to 2017.) But nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom. The only advance we’ve made since then is that Supreme Court dukedoms are not hereditary.

Ouch.
He then goes on to denigrate liberals and our so-called activist judges as he bathes in the purity of conservative judicial supremacy, but he quickly regroups and adds this kicker:

To nominate someone whose adult life reveals no record of even participation in debates about constitutional interpretation is an insult to the institution and to that vision of the institution.

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

It will be argued that this criticism is elitist. But this is not about the Ivy League. The issue is not the venue of Miers’s constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.

Double ouch. Ooo…that’s gotta sting.

He adds this sidebar which I think is hilarious considering it’s a swipe at Bush:

To serve in Congress, or even as president, there is no requirement for scholarship and brilliance. For good reason. It is not needed. It can even be a hindrance, as we learned from our experience with Woodrow Wilson, the most intellectually accomplished president of the 20th century and also the worst.

Yup. I say the next president should be completely illiterate. That sounds like a fine conservative-minded goal.

He does say this though (which is good for a laugh as well):

For a presidency marked by a courageous willingness to think and do big things, this nomination is a sorry retreat into smallness.

He just noticed Bush’s sorry retreats into smallness? Well, at least this nomination has accomplished something.

It’s fun watching conservative heads exploding, isn’t it? Yes. Reality truly sucks.