Harriet and George discuss her future circa 1989.

Stick with me toots!

I’ll make ya’ a judge.

A really-real judge.

One 'a them Supreme Court judges!

But George, you’re not even a really-real cowboy.

Some day, toots. Some day...

(BTW, the photo is from the fabulous midget western – “The Terror of Tiny Town” – via kidshirt’s blog, past which I ambled while peeking, Odin-eyed at the internets from my sick couch.)

Knowing what one knows about the M.O. of the Potempkin Presidency, how to explain Harriet Miers?

In other words, what the fuck was Dubya actually thinking, and has he finally just flipped?

Less than a week ago, this was the best defense the world-killers at the White House could muster. The primary narrative delivered via the NYT...

Plenty of Praise for a Nominee, but Few Details
October 16, 2005

By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 - Ask any of Harriet E. Miers's typically press-shy White House colleagues what she has been like in her years as a top Bush administration staff member, and the praise pours out. She is intelligent. Meticulous. Selfless. Insightful.

But when it comes down to cases, they have a harder time.

"You know, she's a very gracious and funny person," said Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Ms. Miers succeeded as deputy White House chief of staff in 2003. "I was racking my brain trying to think of something specific."

In the next breath, Mr. Bolten recalled relaxing with her at Camp David. "She is a very good bowler," he said. "For someone her size, she actually gets a lot of action out of the pins."
...

[A] lack of specificity [over what she has actually done] has compounded the White House's difficulties in selling Ms. Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court and opened the field to her harshest critics.
...
"You might think anybody who was preparing something to go to the president would already have taken care to see that it was perfect," said David G. Leitch, a former deputy White House counsel who is now general counsel to the Ford Motor Company. "But Harriet always scrubbed them one more time, and managed to come up with things that people hadn't seen or thought of before, from the broad wording of an issue to errors in punctuation."
...

But he added, "What I think made Harriet so successful as staff secretary was that she was a diligent and honest broker, able to digest very complicated material rapidly, and produce a fair resolution for the president, so that the advice that was going in to the president was fully and fairly presented."
...

Kristen Silverberg, a former White House official who is now an assistant secretary of state, spent part of 2003 in Baghdad as an aide to L. Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy to Iraq, and recalled that "Harriet was always the first one on the phone to say, 'Is everything O.K.?' " when there was bad news.

"When the Al Rashid Hotel was bombed," Ms. Silverberg said, "the first e-mail I got was from her."
...

"She's very meticulous," Ms. Silverberg said. "She has a lot of humility in the way she approaches her job. It's never about Harriet. It's always about making sure that everything is perfect and that the president gets the best advice."
...

She’s meticulous and makes sure the spelling is good, so she could probably clerk for a Supreme Court Justice and do a bang-up job. Damn, come to think of it, maybe I could hire her to proofread this blog. Y’know, tap out the dents and lay on an extra coat of lacquer.

And that’s really it. No “there” there whatsoever.

She goes to the Right Church, kisses the Right Ass, and can iron those pesky pluperfect tense entanglements out of the personalized birthday messages the President sends out to his Pioneer Grade contributors.

She punctilious, and positively dotes on Dubya...placing her somewhere between Alice from “The Brady Bunch” and the ideal Miss Moneypenny for the White House Follies production of “Live and Let Die.”

And she bowls well, so...what...The Big Liebowski II?

This is getting comical; turning into an episode of M.A.S.H. where Hawkeye runs around the camp trying to write a eulogy for some dear, departed Nurse Redshirt, only to find that the only thing everyone knew about her was, “Hard worker. Kept to herself. Fucked like a bunny!”

So at the end of the day, what? Why this person?

Is it that her chief weapon is bowling?

Bowling and assiduousness?

Bowling and assiduousness...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Bush.

And nobody, but NOBODY, expected Harriet Miers.

And it was all going so farking well, until this week. This week, when we discovered that her one virtue (outside of her place at the Right Hand of James Dobson in the Kingdom of Heaven and her demonic powers on the lanes at Chucky’s Bowl-O-Rama ) – her positively pecksniffish attention to minutia – was just another White House lie.

That she couldn’t be bothered with keeping up the vig with the Bar Association, and had to get a do-over on the written exam portion of the Big SCOTUS Exam

And the nature of that failure at the One Thing she at which she was supposed to excel, has the Bush/Brownie stink all over it: The complete failure to treat a nomination to the Supreme Court seriously.

The failure to comprehend that the SCOTUS isn’t a test you cram for, it’s a life of excellent you prepare for and lead.

What it clear is the Dimwit Dauphin, left to his own devices, has jammed both paws in two monkey-traps at once and won’t let loose of either banana: He cannot mollify the Right – the only sorry souls left on the face of the Earth who do not believe he is an arrant liar and an abject failure -- without backing down. And he cannot back away from his declaration that Harriet is the best qualified person for the job without admitting error; and admitting error is something he is congenitally counterprogammed never, ever to do.

After all, if Dear Leader isn’t in-fucking-fallible, then he’s not much of a Dear Leader is he? And the Right – especially the Evangelical Right – would much rather see the Universe burned to stumps and ashes that ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever admit that they have made a mistake.

And so here we are, wondering WTF just happened up on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Well, there is another possibility...

One so disturbing that is almost beggars description.

One that fits in all-to-perfectly with the complete failure of anyone, anywhere to remember anything specific Harriet Miers has done during her entire tenure as Loyal Family Retainer on Retainer. One that explains the citation from Joshua Bolten in the article above, where he, “was racking [his] brain trying to think of something specific."

The possibility that neither Rummy nor Cheney, nor Rove nor Dubya are actually in charge of this reckless, rudderless catastrophe of an Administration.

The real power behind the power behind the Dubya’s empty suit and radio-controlled underpants is none other Harriet Miers, Evil Jedi Master.


O.B. Wannabe K. Nobody, Esq.

The first clue should have been her birthplace –- the hardscrabble town of Midichlorian, TX.

A midlife convert to the Force, Harriet’s devotion to proper subject/verb agreement and symmetry caught the fancy of young, peevish, fake-oilman from Midland.

Or so he thought.

Instead, she found this weak-willed sot with the right name and speed-dial access to both a Rolodex full of “Fuck This Country” capitalists and a mob of ruthless wingnut jihadists, and bent him to her will. Using a wily combination of blunt-force, gagging flattery and Jedi mind tricks, she remade him into a snappy power-suit a woman named Harriet might wear with a few sparkly pins and tassels on her way to a crucial, pivotal job for life where she can change the course of our national destiny for the next twenty years, unfettered, unchecked and unbalanced.

Bush, although almost used up now, can once again play out his role as hollow, armor-piercing shell, suitable for delivering one last charge of Fundy High Explosives through the shield of the Constitution and into the heart of Democracy itself.

And given that the default-setting of the GOP is already “mindless obedience”, and that National Embarrassments like Brownback and Santorum can already be distracted and confused by shiny objects, it looks like all that stands between us and mandatory “Bowling For Jesus: Ten Pins and Ten Commandments” re-education classes may be our own, benevolent Jabba the Hutt...


“Bwahaha! Your mind powers will not work on me girl!”

Go get ‘em, Ted.