For someone (like me) interested in the Bush administration’s ongoing troubles, it was a bad morning to spend in a dress rehearsal. The withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination for the Supreme Court signals more troubles on the horizon and a further diminution of the President’s mojo. Even if the withdrawal came as no surprise.
And it should come as no surprise at all: Salon’s War Room points out that columnist Charles Krauthammer practically scripted the withdrawal and the reason for it in a post on Townhall.com last Friday. For a man whose biography brags that he found Stephen Hawking’s popular books on cosmology “entirely incomprehensible,” Krauthammer nailed this one on the head. The adminstration and the Senate, in deadlocking over the release of documentation from Miers’ tenure in the White House, found a way to force the withdrawal of a nominee who was widely seen, on all sides of the political spectrum, as unfit to serve in the nation’s highest court. A neat trick: by quibbling over matters of executive privilege, we can still pretend that the emperor has clothes and that he has not shown himself incapable of finding them.