Snobs and Smoky Rooms

Apparently my paranoia is catching on. In the wake of Harriet Miers' withdrawal (I have to take a brief second here to hate on the east-coast bias that puts me three hours behind the rest of the country -- and I'm not posting a link because the story is freaking everywhere) other like-minded geniuses as odderie are expressing worried puzzlement over the strange series of events that have surrounded the coven of Supreme Court ruminators (how strangely appropriate that Halloween is Monday).

Most of you know how much intellectual snobbery irritates me. It's one thing to hold yourself to rigorous standards of debate and expect the same of others. It's quite another to criticize someone, on the one hand innocently proclaiming "we don't know anything about her!" and on the other calling her "unqualified" (I guess, then, we must know at least one thing about her?). Certainly much of the motivation behind criticisms of Ms. Miers was political, and I don't doubt that a fair share of it was sexist as well. But most of what irritated me was the latent elitism in so-called criticisms of her qualifications. She didn't go to a top ten law school, so clearly she could never make an adequate Supreme Court justice. She's a practitioner, not an academic, so clearly she knows nothing about "the law." Whether people were hiding behind their high-minded ivory-tower concerns while secretly harboring political motives, or genuinely thought themselves better than the woman actually nominated to serve on our country's highest court, these criticisms were, plain and simple, wrong-headed and ill-conceived. Sorry for all the hyphens.

So: might there be an ulterior motive underlying the events of the past month or so? Is Bush in fact an evilgenius (yes, one word)? People laugh and mock the notion that Bush has the mental capacity for such devious plots, yet those same people are quick to point out that he's destroying our country. Look, stupidity and power can do a lot of messed up things. But they can't destroy a country unless the country itself is dumb enough to let that happen. So I think people give Bush more credit than they say they do, and perhaps not even enough credit at that. If Bush nominates Michael McConnell, who now will have the jockeying power to ask, why not Alberto Gonzales or Janice Brown? Bush tried to give us a moderate woman, and we rejected her by hiding behind "principles" (and shoddy principles, at that).

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Well, not me, because I always liked Harriet. But the rest of you. Yup, ashamed, ashamed, ashamed.