Excellence? What's that?

Look, Ma: Two empty suits of blue.

The more plausible complaint about Miers, from the point of view of conservatives, is that she won't have the intellectual prowess to pick the court up and move it, to persuade other justices with the power of her ideas. For moderates and liberals, the complaint is that Bush had plenty of opportunity to pick a woman without picking the one whose best qualification is that she's his friend.

Good God, does George W. Bush have any pretensions toward excellence at all? I mean, good God. Can we please fast forward to January 20, 2009 right now? It's not like this is a conservative's wet dream of a Presidency; this is a Presidency whose main modus operandi all along has been to act like a conservative's wet dream of a Presidency, and hope that they'll be out of office and collecting their handsome pensions for government service before the conservatives figure out that the hand which has been stroking them has, in fact, been nothing more than a big inflatable glove at the end of a stick, while the real hand has been busy plucking their wallets dry.

And if I, as a liberal Democrat, gotta suffer through a conservative Presidency, I'd at least like to sit through a conservative Presidency whose approach to policy isn't the governance equivalent of a monkey tossing its feces about in random fashion.

"Soft bigotry of low expectations"? Well, even the guy with low expectations has some expectations to start with. When these people die, they'll likely be greeted at the Pearly Gates by Antonio Salieri, the Patron Saint of Mediocrities, where he will absolve them. Maybe. If he feels like it. Like as not, he'll just sit at his harpsichord and plink out his forgotten melodies, one at a time, one for each middling figure advanced by other mediocrities as Lincoln's heirs.

It'll take Saint Salieri hours, I wager.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum helpfully collates conservative reaction from around Blogistan. It's kind of reminding me of that scene in Pinnocchio when the boys on Pleasure Island realize just what's about to happen to them.

UPDATE II: Photo added.

Matthew Yglesias:

This sounds more like Miers was an opportunist than a convert. When conservative Democrats ran Texas, she was a conservative Democrat. She gave money to prominent Texas Democrats (Lloyd Bentsen) and to national Democrats who tried to move the party in a more conservative direction (1988-vintage Al Gore). Then, when Republicans came to dominate Texas, she became a Republican....As Kieran Healy points out, it's very unlikely that a woman born in 1945 would manage to have such a successful career in competitive fields while simultaneously being some kind of lightweight. But she's clearly not a heavyweight legal thinker. She's a heavyweight networker, climber, bottom-kisser, and careerist. What, exactly, that implies for her likely service on the Court I couldn't say.

You know, I don't have a problem with the Democrats who voted to confirm John Roberts, on the basis that even if they didn't agree with his ideology, they could at least grant that a President of the opposite ideology as themselves is going to make his court appointments accordingly, and that this guy was qualified. But this pick? Nosiree, Bob.

Say, I wonder if this might fall under the "extreme circumstances" exception in that "No filibustering judges" compromise of a few months back?