Ha ha ha. But if you're from Philly, every 'ha' is hollow this week. The Iggles losed.

FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT. Do you remember when we set up the cage match between Ann Coulter and Keith Olbermann to settle the question of who was the craziest mass media personality ever to graduate from Cornell University? You don't? Well, that's because we never posted the entry. We withheld it for fairness reasons. Either it made Keith Olbermann look like too much of a smacked ass, or it may have been construed as insulting to Cornell. One of those two. We can't remember which. But we always liked the graphic of Ann Coulter dressed to kill in the ring, waiting for an opponent to annihilate. We thought of it again yesterday when Chain Gang sent us an audio clip of Ann on some talk radio show. She's mad about the Harriet Miers thing. Really really mad. She suggested that conservatives who want to do something could organize a committee to impeach George Bush. You can listen to her argument by clicking on the audio button above..

That -- and a bunch of other screamings and shoutings from the right-hand side of the fence -- got us to wondering about what it is exactly the conservatives want. Yes, we know they want a judicial nominee who went to Harvard with all the justices they hate so much, but there's more to it than that. They want a fight. They want some Republican to stand up to the Harvard idiots in the U.S. Senate and explain to them why their self-satisfied liberalism is killing the country. They want it so much they don't care if the Republican senators from Maine and Rhode Island jump to the other side of the aisle in protest. They don't even care if their heroic nominee fails to be confimed by the Senate. They'd much rather have blood.

Well, we have an idea that might help. A tag-team match between the conservatives and the liberals. Put it on TV. Hire that announcer who bellows the names so annoyingly. Get it on in the Octagon of the UFC. Like so:

CIAO. My my my. Get a load of George Will on the Miers nomination:


What a jackass. Honestly. Let's be clear what is being proposed here: that in order to preserve the Constitution, we must dispense with the Constitution and employ confirmation rules dreamed up by a twit in a snit. Who are we to consult for the purpose of identifying 100 people who are capable of making "sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution"? Let's take a wild guess. Would it be George Will? But he doesn't answer that question exactly. There's much too much showing off to do. For example:


We told you yesterday this whole thing was about snobbery. The tirade quoted above demonstrates that and something else; the snobbery is being amplified by pure dudgeon about a number of conservative beefs, including Will's pet peeve:


Let's go Mr. Will one better and actually think about the argument he is trying to assemble here. First of all, interpreting the Constitution is a talent -- unless it's a skill (Which is it, George? Those aren't synonyms in my dictionary) -- that can only be acquired by highly trained specialists who represent only a subset of all attorneys. It can't be done by amateurs, and no amateur should even try. Oka-a-a-y. George Bush isn't an attorney of any kind. Under what article of the new George Will Constitution would the President  have the right to pass judgment on the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold? Oh. Of course. Under the article (or its penumbra) which legitimizes all executive actions congruent with the intellectual or emotional whims of the Founding Father, George Will. But instead, the President deferred the matter of McCain-Feingold's constitutionality to the U.S. Supreme Court -- i.e., highly trained specialists in interpreting the Constitution -- who proceeded to declare it (drum roll, please!) constitutional.

Well, by Mr. Will's own argument with respect to the Miers nomination -- remember what he started ranting about in the first place -- this outcome means that the President (if he thought McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional) was wrong, and the great intellectuals of the court were right. So what is George Will's beef? That he disagrees with the highly trained specialists of the court. Hmmmm.


This is a quote from Will's Washington Post bio. Very nice education. Very impressive. One slight problem, though. No sign of a law degree or "years of practice sustained by intense interest" in constitutional reasoning.

There's plenty of room to criticize George Bush for failing to veto McCain-Feingold, but it's no more than pompous rhetoric to declare that the President has "forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution." Particularly in light of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold it AND the astonishing conclusion reached by George Will  that the Senate somehow merits the trust he no longer feels for the President. His hopes for the senate are lofty indeed:


Standards of seriousness. Right. Are we allowed to ask who it is that passed McCain-Feingold into law? Who? Oh. The Congress, including approximately the same senate that is now miraculously endowed with the "sophisticated judgment" to detect either the talent or the skill George Will requires, whenever he decides which it is. The approximate same senate that gave 97 votes to Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, who never met a clause of the Constitution she wouldn't be happier rewriting than interpreting.

From this point on, Will's tantrum degenerates into a charge of victimhood the nominee seems to have spent a lifetime eschewing. We can safely ignore all that part of the denouement. But what are we left with?  A columnist with no law degree has more authority to select supreme court nominees than a non-lawyer president who has disappointed the columnist's political expectations.

Time to correct a few misimpressions. Supreme Court judges are not the democratic equivalent of Vestal Virgins. They don't follow a special diet, breathe special air, and they don't live in sacred temples. Nor for that matter do they have to be lawyers, any more than the Constitution's authors had to be. Benjamin Franklin had some pretty impressive reasoning skills, but no law degree.

The Constitution does not say that if the President isn't intellectual enough to suit the educational snobs of his generation that he must find 100 smarter people to make his supreme court selections for him. (We'd dearly love to have witnessed the outcome of the duel that would followed George Will's attempt to give this particular lecture to Andrew Jackson. Oh well.)

The inflated demands in this piece remind us of another blowhard's famous canard (Carl Sagan, Cornell, no law degree) that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." As a matter of fact, they don't. They require exactly the same kind of proof needed for ordinary claims. Presidents have selected supreme court justices for all kinds of reasons, including politics, friendship, and legitimate credentials. The founders knew this would happen. That's why they gave the senate a role in advice and consent. Not because the senators would turn out to be better or smarter than the President, but because government appointments take place in the arena of politics and open political proceedings tend to be more noisy and less corrupt than closed political proceedings, except when it's the other way around. That's one of the many many flawed compromises our form of government asks us to accept.

Those who don't accept such compromises are free to propose their own rules, as George Will has done. God bless his First Amendment right to speak down to the rest of us. Perhaps we should follow his lead. Here are three rules we think will improve the confirmation process for Harriet Miers:

1. Don't ever take seriously any sermon delivered by an adult male who is wearing a bowtie.

2. Don't ever forget that lawyers are great at causing trouble and rarely competent at fixing it..

3. Regardless of what happens in the Miers hearings, we will -- most of us -- continue living our lives as if the terrible outcome of the confirmation process had never occurred.

Now get some rest. Relax. Do something that makes you feel good and happy today. Here endeth the lesson.