Conservatives are not sounding their best these days, amid  gale—force Bush—bashing on The Right Side of America.  The trouble is that George W is playing poker again, and it's impossible to read his special Texas poker face. Nobody knows Harrier Miers except the man who worked with her all these years making judicial picks, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

And many conservative thinkers don't trust W to make this decision, because, frankly, they don't think he's smart enough to understand constitutional jurisprudence. For six years we've seen the Left going into Daffy Duck hysterics while Bush was quietly playing his cards. But now even the unflappable George Will is, well, flapping wildly enough to make Daffy proud.

Comes now Robert Novak, who has Read the Mind of Bush.

"The question recurs: ''What was he thinking?'' Bushologists figure the president was irked by repetitive demands that he satisfy the base with his Supreme Court appointments. He also was irked by the conservative veto of his Texas friend ... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. So, Bush showed the critics by naming another close aide ... to draw the ire of the party's right wing."

So Novak thinks that Bush made one of the history—making decisions of his Presidency just ro get even. Well,  if this was LBJ, Novak could be right.

But is this the President we have come to know over the past six years? No way. This is not the George W. who has privately cried with the families of dead soldiers, refusing to turn his feelings into photo op for cheap publicity. This is not the man who twenty years ago turned his life toward moral seriousness. It is certainly not the thinking of the foremost conviction politicians of our lifetimes ——— whose Presidency has been marked by a constant readiness to tolerate hysterical public abuse for what he thought was right.

Could Harriet Miers turn out to be a disappointment?  Sure.  Was she nominated for reasons of petty revenge by George W?  Naaah.

James Lewis    10 06 05