OPEN COMMENT TO LAURA INGRAHAM ON HARRIET MIERS, GRAMMAR AND ELITISM
I've got to hand it to you . . . the arrogant Eastern elitists and Ivy Leaguers GOT LUCKY with the 1993 Miers speeches. (OH HOW I HOPE I PROPERLY PUNCTUATED THAT COMMENT!) The speeches gave thoughtful conservatives cover to oppose Miers--which was the true tipping point-- without joining the reactionary lynch mob organized by the Ivy League and elite pundits. Of course, this material would have been discovered in due course without the three weeks of internecine bloodletting administered by the "insiders" of the right.
I prayerfully hope President Bush now nominates a candidate who can run the gauntlet of the wobbly moderates (Snowe, DeWine, Spector, Chaffee etc.) and will sufficiently pacify the "fighters" on the elite right (whom I don't recall doing much of anything to stop Ginsburg and Breyer--notwithstanding their open and notorious defects). However, I strongly suspect the Miers "defeat" will materially encourage and rally even the non-radicalized remnants of the "moderate" left to obstruct any nominee from this damaged president. If we end up with a non-evangelical, or even secular, moderate in the O'Connor seat, it will be due in no small measure to the rhetorical excesses of the insular club of Eastern elites and Ivy Leaguers in immediately opposing Miers without evidence or fair hearing.
Laura, face the reality that those who vocally "toil in the vineyard"(quoting Ingraham) CANNOT GET THE VOTES TO BE CONFIRMED! The Miers "defeat" does nothing to change that fact. Even the venerable Justice Thomas was a post-Bork stealth nominee!
Sam Schulman hammered the key defects in the movement conservative elitist criticism of the Miers nomination (before the damaging release of her 1993 speeches): "None of these pundits has the slightest concern for reality — or, more important, a proper sense of loyalty. Could Bush have proposed a more notoriously brilliant judicial conservative? Of course he could have named such a person. And then what?" http://jewishworldreview.com/sam/schulman101405.php3
Laura, please refrain from implying that odd, Second Amendment gutting gasbag Robert Bork is remotely credible. The conservative movement's most celebrated martyr -- that iconic brainiac . . . weird, old Judge Bork-- unreliably uses "process" and "vast constitutional expertise" to wrongly argue that the 2nd Amendment is a collective right. This demonstrates the elite benchmarks for judicial "competence" and "excellence" aren't all that reliable. And it shatters Bork's credibility.
The movement talking points on Miers articulated by Judge Bork and many others ignored a crucial reality of Supreme Court practice: the hottest issues are now extensively briefed by scores of amici and well-represented litigants. A reliably conservative justice can marshal the best of these arguments in support of sophisticated originalist results. Yet the elitists insiders have now artificially elevated Supreme Court practice to the zenith of legal complexity. One wonders whether the founders would have wanted Court membership to be limited to a few "Tier One" law school professors, top special interest litigators, appellate judges, and highly active members of the Supreme Court bar?
Elitist "concern" about law school and law firm rank -- as if these were meaningful indicators of "comptence" -- sent a not-so-subtle metamessage: "big fish" in small, fly-over country "ponds" need not apply. Abraham Lincoln probably couldn't even qualify for the Court under the conservative elite's implied "excellence" and "best available nominee" standards (Abe litigated too many ordinary cases as a small town lawyer and debating Douglas was just meaningless "talk").
Sure, Fox News Channel's Brit Hume muffed the elitism argument by focusing it only on the Ivy-tinged past of the most vocal insider critics. The elitism charge is more complex and subtle than whether someone attended one of the "right" schools. Sadly, the Ivy League and Beltway pundits served up superficial and hasty condemnation. However, even lynch mobs sometimes nab the guilty--but at the expense of the process.
On grammar and usage: the elite byword "gender" does not properly refer to the sex of human beings. "[W]ords have gender and people have sex." James D. Maugans. The Grammatical Lawyer (Philadelphia: ALI-ABA, 1996), 133. True conservatives ought not to adopt such leftist usages, even those who hold themselves out as guardians of language.
These conservative elite "guardians" opposing Miers often ripped her compositional skill. However, ham-fisted aping from partisan David Brooks’ highly-selective parsing of a few isolated, inelegant sentences allegedly written years ago by Ms. Miers in an inherently mushy, political context and then extrapolating this sparse data into the grand assertion that she is "disqualified" by reason of her mediocre composition skill is significantly more insubstantial as an argument than the linguistic "sins" that so concern Brooks, Chris Matthews and Judge Bork. Anyone with a distinguished thirty-year career in the law has undoubtedly written millions of words and hundreds of thousands of sentences–at least a handful of which will prove less than eloquent in retrospect and when stripped of context.
Such "stylistic" objections are both hypocritical-- when articulated by such an undeniably goofy geeks as Robert Bork-- and another exemplar of elitism.
Laura, you and your elite insider friends won, but it was an ugly victory indeed.
I've got to hand it to you . . . the arrogant Eastern elitists and Ivy Leaguers GOT LUCKY with the 1993 Miers speeches. (OH HOW I HOPE I PROPERLY PUNCTUATED THAT COMMENT!) The speeches gave thoughtful conservatives cover to oppose Miers--which was the true tipping point-- without joining the reactionary lynch mob organized by the Ivy League and elite pundits. Of course, this material would have been discovered in due course without the three weeks of internecine bloodletting administered by the "insiders" of the right.
I prayerfully hope President Bush now nominates a candidate who can run the gauntlet of the wobbly moderates (Snowe, DeWine, Spector, Chaffee etc.) and will sufficiently pacify the "fighters" on the elite right (whom I don't recall doing much of anything to stop Ginsburg and Breyer--notwithstanding their open and notorious defects). However, I strongly suspect the Miers "defeat" will materially encourage and rally even the non-radicalized remnants of the "moderate" left to obstruct any nominee from this damaged president. If we end up with a non-evangelical, or even secular, moderate in the O'Connor seat, it will be due in no small measure to the rhetorical excesses of the insular club of Eastern elites and Ivy Leaguers in immediately opposing Miers without evidence or fair hearing.
Laura, face the reality that those who vocally "toil in the vineyard"(quoting Ingraham) CANNOT GET THE VOTES TO BE CONFIRMED! The Miers "defeat" does nothing to change that fact. Even the venerable Justice Thomas was a post-Bork stealth nominee!
Sam Schulman hammered the key defects in the movement conservative elitist criticism of the Miers nomination (before the damaging release of her 1993 speeches): "None of these pundits has the slightest concern for reality — or, more important, a proper sense of loyalty. Could Bush have proposed a more notoriously brilliant judicial conservative? Of course he could have named such a person. And then what?" http://jewishworldreview.com/sam/schulman101405.php3
Laura, please refrain from implying that odd, Second Amendment gutting gasbag Robert Bork is remotely credible. The conservative movement's most celebrated martyr -- that iconic brainiac . . . weird, old Judge Bork-- unreliably uses "process" and "vast constitutional expertise" to wrongly argue that the 2nd Amendment is a collective right. This demonstrates the elite benchmarks for judicial "competence" and "excellence" aren't all that reliable. And it shatters Bork's credibility.
The movement talking points on Miers articulated by Judge Bork and many others ignored a crucial reality of Supreme Court practice: the hottest issues are now extensively briefed by scores of amici and well-represented litigants. A reliably conservative justice can marshal the best of these arguments in support of sophisticated originalist results. Yet the elitists insiders have now artificially elevated Supreme Court practice to the zenith of legal complexity. One wonders whether the founders would have wanted Court membership to be limited to a few "Tier One" law school professors, top special interest litigators, appellate judges, and highly active members of the Supreme Court bar?
Elitist "concern" about law school and law firm rank -- as if these were meaningful indicators of "comptence" -- sent a not-so-subtle metamessage: "big fish" in small, fly-over country "ponds" need not apply. Abraham Lincoln probably couldn't even qualify for the Court under the conservative elite's implied "excellence" and "best available nominee" standards (Abe litigated too many ordinary cases as a small town lawyer and debating Douglas was just meaningless "talk").
Sure, Fox News Channel's Brit Hume muffed the elitism argument by focusing it only on the Ivy-tinged past of the most vocal insider critics. The elitism charge is more complex and subtle than whether someone attended one of the "right" schools. Sadly, the Ivy League and Beltway pundits served up superficial and hasty condemnation. However, even lynch mobs sometimes nab the guilty--but at the expense of the process.
On grammar and usage: the elite byword "gender" does not properly refer to the sex of human beings. "[W]ords have gender and people have sex." James D. Maugans. The Grammatical Lawyer (Philadelphia: ALI-ABA, 1996), 133. True conservatives ought not to adopt such leftist usages, even those who hold themselves out as guardians of language.
These conservative elite "guardians" opposing Miers often ripped her compositional skill. However, ham-fisted aping from partisan David Brooks’ highly-selective parsing of a few isolated, inelegant sentences allegedly written years ago by Ms. Miers in an inherently mushy, political context and then extrapolating this sparse data into the grand assertion that she is "disqualified" by reason of her mediocre composition skill is significantly more insubstantial as an argument than the linguistic "sins" that so concern Brooks, Chris Matthews and Judge Bork. Anyone with a distinguished thirty-year career in the law has undoubtedly written millions of words and hundreds of thousands of sentences–at least a handful of which will prove less than eloquent in retrospect and when stripped of context.
Such "stylistic" objections are both hypocritical-- when articulated by such an undeniably goofy geeks as Robert Bork-- and another exemplar of elitism.
Laura, you and your elite insider friends won, but it was an ugly victory indeed.
posted by Editor at 08:58
3 Comments:
Speedzzter
I like your post today.....I think we may be soulmates (but in a platoniclyinsightful sense of course). Great points you make.....and don't worry about slapping me down on the "conservofascist" comment...I'll forgive you
Good luck with the blogging, and in life.
God is still on His throne.
You are still supporting her now that you know she's a liberal?! You were wrong and you still can't admit it. Sad.
Laura
How do you know "she's a liberal"?
Are you basing that on comments in a 12 year old speech, or on the statements she made at her hearing before the Judiciary comitee? OH....WAIT........she didn't get a hearing.....she only got pummeled by the great knowitalls from the right, who used liberal democrat tactics to sink her nomination.
You don't know her judicail philosophy nor her political persuasion, but you spout off as though you do.
It feels so good to be on the "conservative" team with a bunch of fascists.
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