Georges, vous perdez vos partisans

Ed Morrissey at the Captain’s Quarter’s blog is one seriously steamed Bush supporter. Unlike the three “disappointed” but relentlessly apologetic Bush supporters at Powerline, who as of Tuesday night have not posted anything about Mrs. Bush’s stunning attack on Harriet Miers’s critics as “sexists,” Morrissey launches into the First Couple like nothing I’ve ever seen in a pro-Bush precinct, saying the sort of things about the president’s motives that in the past have gotten people labeled as Bush haters. After quoting Mrs. Bush’s comment on the Today program that Miers’s opponents have not looked at her accomplishments, he writes:

Perhaps people haven’t looked at her accomplishments because this White House has been completely inept at promoting them. We have heard about her work in cleaning up the Texas Lottery Commission, her status as the first woman to lead the Texas Bar Association, and her leadership as the managing partner of a large Texas law firm. Given that conservatives generally don’t trust trial lawyers and the Bar Association and are at best ambivalent to government sponsorship of gambling, those sound rather weak as arguments for a nomination to the Supreme Court. If Miers has other accomplishments that indicate why conservatives should trust Bush in her nomination, we’ve yet to hear that from the White House.

Instead, we get attacked for our supposed “sexism,” which does more to marginalize conservatives than anything the Democrats have done over the past twenty years—and it’s so demonstrably false that one wonders if the President has decided to torch his party out of a fit of pique. [LA comment: Wow!] After all, it wasn’t our decision to treat the O’Connor seat as a quota fulfillment; that seems to have originated with the First Lady herself, a form of sexism all its own….

[W]ith those practiced in the victimization smear, the facts really don’t matter at all. This kind of argument we expect from the Barbara Boxers and the Ted Kennedys, not from a Republican White House.

It’s enough to start making me think that we need to send a clearer message to George Bush. The White House needs to rethink its relationship to reality and its so-far loyal supporters.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2005 09:59 PM | Send