Harriet Kari

Putsch is so weak he can’t even scare Joe Lieberman

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
10/27/05
http://zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/hari.htm

Well. Damn.

Here we all were, sitting around waiting on Patrick Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury to come out with their indictments, and suddenly the Harriet Miers thing disintegrated. That nomination came apart like a K-Mart t-shirt on Clark Kent.

By the time we all finished saying “Whaaaa...?” Harriet Miers had become just a footnote in history, along with Ginsberg and Haynesworth and a dozen or so others who got nominated to the Supreme Court but didn’t make it.

It wasn’t even a case of the opposition party unleashing the dogs of war. (“Bork! Bork! Bork!”) The nomination turned into wet Kleenex all on its own.

First, credit where credit is due. The right was too stupid to recognize that Putsch was trying to slide a ringer – one of THEIR ringers – past the rest of the country, and revolted. That right there put Putsch in a hell of a bind, since he was stuck trying to assuage the paranoia and suspicious nature of his one and only base without coming right out and telling everyone he wanted to put an anti-freedom bible-banging whack on the court. There were several other factors in the death of Harriet Kari that played a big role:

Miers looked ridiculous when her gush notes to Putsch emerged. These days, with the public generally apathetic and convinced the country is doomed anyway, the Pubs can slide spectacularly bad candidates into office, and the warnings about these toadies and cronies go disregarded, but a nomination like this cannot survive ridicule. Hundreds of cartoonists had fun drawing Harriet as following Putsch around like a love-lorn helium balloon dressed in schoolgirl outfits.

Her nomination came immediately after the Brown affair raised public questions about cronyism and corruption in the Administration, and she was seen as sort of a Brown with tits. A love-lorn Brown with tits. One almost expected Putsch to pat her on the head in public and say, “You’re doing a hell of a job, Harry” and in fact several cartoonists touched on that theme in various ways.

The admin flat out refused to divulge a lot of materials relating to her professional background, much of which related in one way or another to citizen, governor and president Putsch. Putsch argued that it was unfair to demand that private matters involving the president should be made a part of her background experience mosaic, and this didn’t sit well, either with the folks who thought Putsch should have thought of that before he nominated her, or with those who figured he took that into account exactly.

She insulted the Senate with a cursory filling out of the paperwork they demanded. Indeed, one senator publically branded it insulting, and even among Republicans, there was a restless feeling that perhaps Putsch’s belief that party loyalists made good door mats was wearing thin.

And finally, she said that elected assemblies such as state legislature were subject to
affirmative action remedies. It was an incredibly silly thing to say about a subject where she was supposed to have substantial knowledge, and the religious right, belatedly realizing that their yowls that Miers didn’t want to turn America into Jesusland weren’t playing well with either mainstream Republicans or the general public, seized on Mier’s brain fart to proclaim that she didn’t have the constitutional rigor to qualify for the court. As if Clarence Thomas did.

Nominating her showed the political weakness of the administration, which no longer benefits from nominating a raving loon from the far right such as Priscilla Owens. Having the nomination blow up in his face only weakens Putsch further, and comes at a time when the Grand Jury is about to indict, and rumors are flying that Fitzgerald is preparing to have another jury empaneled. Evidently he's found something.

At this point, a rational politician – and I won’t insult my readers by pretending I think Putsch falls into that category – would veer away from the right wing extremists and start fence mending with the moderates, at least in his own party. It’s a simple matter of math: the loons make up about 20% of the voters, and everyone else falls into the 80% category. If you can appeal to 20% of the population and manage to piss off half the rest, you come out ahead over all, 60-40. But if you appeal to that 20% and alienate the majority of the rest, you are in deep trouble.

He could try another stealth candidate like Miers, but odds are that won’t succeed. The moderates aren’t going to embrace a right winger because the right wing is becoming extremely unpopular with the rest of the country, and Putsch can’t put an unknown in without spelling out to the far right that this new candidate is just as crazy a dirtbag as they are, so please show a little support. If he does, he loses in the Senate.

A moderate would be his best bet as far as numbers go, but he isn’t going to do that.

He has other problems. The whole Miers thing kicked out the right wing propaganda machine that had been erected around nominations. As one of the weasels noted, they can’t simply say “trust me” because when made the same offer, they refused and went nuclear. They can’t whine about how every candidate deserves an up-or-down vote, because they denied Miers that. And they can’t talk about avoiding litmus tests for jurors, because they applied the same to Miers and reacted before the paper even had a chance to show a color change.

Further, his bully boys – Frist, Rove, Libby, Cheney, DeLay – are all either under indictment or under other types of legal threat. Bullying the moderates in the Senate – or even the Democrats – isn’t going to be easy. That tightens his options that much more.

And of course, between natural disasters and the Iraq fiasco, his popularity has tanked, and there’s still enough of a democracy left in America that this makes his power much less persuasive to politicians in lower popular esteem. At this point, a threat that he’ll personally campaign against anyone who doesn’t do as he says isn’t going to have the impact a similar threat would have had in 2002.

The only hope he has is that Patrick Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury will produce findings so explosive, and indictments so politically mind-boggling, that everyone will briefly forget about the war, hurricanes, Supreme Court nominations, or even Jeff Gannon.

Which is a bit like hoping a tiger will bite off your arm to get rid of that annoying hangnail.

In other words, no matter what he does, Putsch is truly and thoroughly screwed.

Next: Merry Fritzmas! Treason’s Greetings!