Pride and Preoccupation

I'm ready to say it. All this time, we've assumed that, based on his public speaking skills(of lack there-of), and complete inability to plan for the future, that the president was an idiot. No exit plan for Iraq, a non-existant solution to social security, and then the attempted appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were all just reinforcement of our presumptions, right?

WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There's a show I loved for the one season it was on called "Jack and Bobby". The premise of this show revolved around two brothers, one of which becomes president in the future. Each episode is based around an issue that "President" Bobby had to deal with, and how he learned to deal with it when he was younger. Now in one of these episodes, Bobby nominates a golfing buddy of his for an opening in the Supreme Court. However, the opposing party to his jumps on this and eventually gets his nominee to resign, since he had no real qualifications other than being the president's friend.

Do you see a connection here?

Of course, this was all part of a brilliant political strategy by Bobby and his party to get their REAL candidate elected. See, if he'd have been nominated first, the opposition would have ruthlessly gone after him. But by nominating someone else first, someone obviously not qualified, and getting them removed, it paved the way for his REAL nominee. And the opposition couldn’t be nearly as strong against the second nominee, because it would look like he was being opposed simply because he had different views, since, like Samuel Alito, he was more than qualified. The only possible reason the opposition could muster to fight the nominee would be one that would be seen as weak, argumentative, and politically motivated. That is exactly what has happened here. Whether it was bush(nearly impossible), Cheney(likely), or the evil puppeteer Rove, someone made a brilliant maneuver to get an extremely conservative judicial candidate moved to the front of the line and past the majority of opposition that could have been used against him because now it would seem like interparty bickering to oppose a qualified candidate. The primary reason that Miers was forced to resign was because she wasn’t qualified, but in scoring this victory, the Democratic party made the entire nomination process focus on whether or not a candidate was qualified. Alito clearly is qualified, and is the perfect candidate to be nominated by bush and his uber-conservative party(and i dont mean the Republicans). By nominating Miers first and shining a spotlight on her most obvious flaw, her lack of experience, the entire nomination and confirmation process is now focused on whether of not the candidate is experienced and qualified for the job, not that persons personal views. Alito is, and Harriet Miers was the martyr they sacrificed to change the focus from his radical right-wing views to his qualifications as being the primary reason he should get the job. The problem with pulling a brilliant strategic maneuver like this is that it can only be used once; after that, everyone should wise up and it won't work again. Using it to get their perfect candidate nominated to the Supreme Court where he can begin to institute his well-documented plan to obliterate Roe v Wade from the legal landscape is probably the best use they could have found for it though, so congratulations to the neo-conservative party.

Of course, with half of their party either indicted on felony charges or already on the way to prison, the party won't possibly last long enough to do permanent damage to this beautiful experiment of ours.

So Here's a Thought... We all got played. Period. Sorry, but I can't come up with anything witty or sarcastic to say about it, since this is awfully embarrassing. There's a lot we can learn here though. Me personally, I've learned to never underestimate a person, because you can never really, truly know them. And if you can never actually know someone else, you can't know their true potential. The people who are the very least likely could very well surprise you. Einstein failed high-school math and Michael Jordan got cut from his high-school basketball team, after all.