Miered...

Loose Canon has long admired George W. Bush's refusal to be intimidated, especially by those who oppose the Iraq war. But right now his ruling passion--that Harriet Miers deserves to be on the Supreme Court--is wrong. The word on the Sunday morning talk shows, however, is that Bush is digging in his heels; he won't budge.

That means it is up to Republican senators to buck the president. If you're interested in how this fiasco happened, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund has the inside track. Fund agrees that Bush won't give up:

"President Bush has returned from a weekend in Camp David, where much of the discussion centered on the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers. While the president is determined to press forward, the prognosis he received was grim. Her visits with senators have gone poorly. Her written answers to questions from the Senate were sent back as if they were incomplete homework. The nominee herself has stumbled frequently in the tutorials in which government lawyers are grilling her in preparation for her Nov. 7 hearings.

"The president trusts his instincts, and they are usually right. But when they fail him, the result can be calamitous. Take last December's nomination of Bernard Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security. After several scandals involving his time as head of New York City's police quickly surfaced, it was then learned he had employed an illegal alien as a nanny and failed to submit required Social Security payments. After only a week, Mr. Bush quietly allowed Mr. Kerik to withdraw his name."

According to Fund, Bush will not be so sensible about a member of his inner circle:

"Many longtime supporters of President Bush have been startled to get phone calls from allies of the president strongly implying that a failure to support Ms. Miers will be unhealthy to their political future. 'The message in Texas is, if you aren't for this nominee, you are against the president," one conservative leader in that state told me. The pressure has led to more resentment than results.'"

This is one time the President must be thwarted. For those who can't get enough of Harriet, Jim Boulet of English first sees something nefarious behind the notoriously detail oriented Ms. Miers' inadequate response to senate questionaires,while John Hindraker questions the wisdom of a Republican rejection of Miers. I think the wisdom of a justice without legal wisdom is even more questionable...

For the record, however, I should not have referred to Ms. Miers as Harriet the Apostate--despite several earlier reports, Ms. Miers was never a Catholic.