I am not really a big fan Ann Coulter, although I do have a soft spot for people who can, with just a few words, send our friends on the left into fits of apoplexy (Rush Limbaugh comes to mind, Zell Miller is another), but since the moment Harriet Miers was nominated for the Supreme Court seat, I had been chomping at the bit to see what Ann would say. My wait is over, and she goes nuclear:
I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush’s real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.
Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him [paging Hugh Hewitt– ed.], claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney’s many virtues – loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture …
To be sure, if we were looking for philosopher-kings, an SMU law grad would probably be preferable to a graduate from an elite law school. But if we’re looking for lawyers with giant brains to memorize obscure legal cases and to compose clearly reasoned opinions about ERISA pre-emption, the doctrine of equivalents in patent law, limitation of liability in admiralty, and supplemental jurisdiction under Section 1367 – I think we want the nerd from an elite law school. Bush may as well appoint his chauffeur head of NASA as put Miers on the Supreme Court…
However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn’t qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on “The West Wing,” let alone to be a real one. Both Republicans and Democrats should be alarmed that Bush seems to believe his power to appoint judges is absolute. This is what “advice and consent” means.
Heh.
Gratefulcub
Funny
Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t republicans saying something just short of the president’s “power to appoint is absolute” when they were ramming through conservative judges to appeals courts?
Lines
Kill me now, I can’t agree with (M)Ann Hands.
Rick
I normally have a huge, Santa-like laff at moonbat conspiracists, and their Hugh Hewitt-like opposites, who detect great strategery in White House operations. That’s normally.
But I’m suspecting a game might be afoot here, with Smirky Bushitlerburton not about to be too broken up about a Senate rejection of old Harriet. A new type of trailblazing: first female SCOTUS nominee to be rejected, like Carswell and Haynesworth. You’ve come a long way, baby.
Yeah, I’m smart like that.
Cordially…
Jack Roy
I had expressed something similar earlier in the week; when a friend of mine saw that Ms. Coulter and I were of a mind, he sent me the link together with the Bill Murray line from Ghostbusters: “Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!”
It didn’t soften the blow.
And it’s not just lefties that can be sent into apoplexy by Ms. “Kill their men and convert the rest to Christianity.” Or if it is, the supposedly decent elements of the right have some ‘splainin’ to do.
Steve
I’m embarassed to have gone to the same law school as Ann Coulter, and I don’t mean because she is Ann Coulter, I mean because of this post. I don’t go around telling people how going to a good law school makes you intellectually superior, or anything like that.
People who follow the traditional route of top law school, judicial clerkship, Supreme Court clerkship, government lawyer, federal judge, yadda yadda, are better qualified for the Supreme Court because they’ve spent more time immersing themselves in the issues of constitutional law. But the identity of the law school is a tiny part of this equation, and the only significance is that a good law school gives you a better chance of landing a prestigious clerkship and launching you on that path.
I think it is entirely possible to attack Miers’ qualifications without being elitist, but Coulter’s attack is so elitist as to be absurd. Ann Coulter doesn’t understand the Constitution because she went to a top law school, she understands the Constitution because the voices tell her what it means.
Gratefulcub
Dictator?
Drunk?
Those are liberal talking points
She’s on the top of her game. Liberals are the devil. Red staters are: 1)American 2)Decent which means again, blue staters are 1)traitors 2)not so decent and 3)Still the Devil
She should write a comic book about conservatives from Yale, traveling the country, from Kansas to Oklahoma, beating back the best the blue states have to offer.
ppGaz
Coulter actually has the ability to form an independent thought?
Maybe. Call me unconvinced. A bogus war going on for almost three years hasn’t moved Coulter to step back from the Kool Aid pitcher …. but Ms. Miers has?
I’m torn between thinking that Coulter has come out of her long state of mania, and thinking that she is just gaming us.
Until I have more information, I have to go with the latter.
Mark
Yeah Rick,
Forget being “Borked.” Any woman rejected could very well be “Miered.”
Tim F
Bring me a fire hose and a carton of Lava soap. Ick.
M. Scott Eiland
I’ve finally figured it out. The high traffic and posting levels at dKos can be explained by the evil Dr. Kos having acquired the Bizarro ray machine and using it to create thousands of imperfect clones of Ann Coulter–who naturally spend their time attacking all things that the real one supports and vice versa. The tip-off was how easily the Kos Kid standard cracks about dictators and booze fit into the rant here.
Andrei
The whole thing for the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Coulters has been one big game this entire time. Who other than a car salesman would title a book “How to Talk to Liberals” or call Clinton a traitor and actually mean it?
And that’s what so sad. They shill shit and the general audience they draw think they are serious. All they want are ratings. They are nothing but whores, and that’s not news.
slide
Coulter NOW talking about advice and consent? [smile] oh, this is just too delicious. Actually, it seems that Bush did get the advice of the Senate on this appointment. Senator Reid apparently. Liberals, my advice, stay out of the way. Say nice innoculous things like, “we’ll have to find out more about her” etc. etc. Let the right bitch slap each other, call each other sexist and elitist, impune each other’s purity, and basically froth at the mouth for a while, I’m enjoying this way too much.
BarneyG
Speaking of Kos, we just got off of a conference call with the RNC regarding HM. Lot’s of prolifers there as well. Very intersting (wink, wink)
slide
Do fill us in Barney. I tried to get through but too much other stuff going on around here. What was the general demeanor of the conference call? Did they accept questions?
Tim F
WEAK
BarneyG
You can read all about it at the Kos.
The conference call lasted about 35 minutes. There were several speakers, most I do not know but Melhman and Dobson spoke. Mostly it was the same old-trust us Bush knows what he is doing.
There were several refrences to her prolife beliefs, also supported by the speakers.
They did take two questions.
Jim
More elitist crap, although it’s easier to take from a babe. (She’s hot, so who cares if she’s irrational.) Graduation from an “elite” college or law school (Ivy plus NYU, Berkeley, Stanford, UVA, Coulter’s Michigan, etc.) should be a disqualification for appointment. You can never trust them, and their “records” do not accurately predict what they will do when freed from supervision and ambition(see D. Souter). They tend to believe they are philosopher-kings, with the right to dictate to their inferiors–for said inferiors’ own good, of course.
The best way to predict fidelity to principle is personal knowledge of the person, which is what we’ve got here. By the way, most SCt cases do not involve “issues of constitutional law,” but concern statutory interpretation, often mind-numbing.
CaseyL
Maybe Coulter’s hoping to be named to the Court herself.
Krista
I suppose she could be considered attractive, if you ignore the forked tongue and glowing red eyes….
Davebo
Wow, Anne is plaigerising Rod Dreher both at the Corner and the DMN blog.
jg
She’s a hag. You’re nuts dude.
Lines
She’s a man, baby. Yeah!
ppGaz
I suppose, if you like the anorexic crazed ferret look.
pleonastic piranha
ann coulter is still an irrelevant attention whore, whether she disses liberals or suddenly finds it convenient to pounce on bush. why anyone capable of intelligent thought gives her the time of day is beyond me.
SeesThroughIt
The absolute worst part of all this is this little parenthetical:
No! She has identified one of this grammar nerd’s top grammar pet peeves and is snarking about it! Ann Coulter and I *shudder* have the same hangups about improper grammar. This hits waaaaay too close to home. I’m gonna need a radiation decontamination shower now.
Steve
Can you explain the that/which distinction in 50 words or less, for the benefit of us mere mortals?
jg
That witch is a hag. There, less than 50 words. :)
Jane Finch
Let’s see…Ann is anti-liberal elite academe except when she’s not. No wonder it’s hard to take the denizens of Outer Wingnuttia (thank you, Tbogg) seriously.
Otto Man
Really? Have you seen the Adam’s apple?
Welcome to your own private Crying Game.
SeesThroughIt
The quick-n-dirty explanation is:
“That” is used for essential and/or identifying material and does not take a comma.
EX: These are the books that have influenced my thinking.
“Which” is used for nonessential modifying phrases and takes a comma.
EX: These books, which have influenced my thinking, are all great reads.
Vlad
I can’t believe that Coulter just said a SMU degree is worth shit, considering that Karen Hughes, Laura Bush, and ex-senator John Tower were also alums.
Mears may be unqualified, but there’s nothing wrong with having been a big fish in a medium-sized pond.
scs
Steve said:
Finally someone who is in the know, who spells out my point. People, especially under educated people, spend too much time worshipping the status instead of figuring out the knowledge behind it.
Steve, since you are a lawyer, can you inform us about just how specialized Constitutional law really is, and how removed it would have been from Meirs experience as a top political lawyer? Is it something that can be learned? And if not, how come many successful Supreme Court Justices were just politicians beforehand? Surely Meirs has more legal background than those Justices.
Anyway, the way Ann Coulter acts, is that Meirs was a kindergarden teacher before this. She has to remember that Meirs is 60 years old and the opportunites that Coulter had were in part paved the way by people like Meirs who paid her way through her Texas school, proved herself, and set in motion new opportunities to younger women like Coulter.
Steve
Constitutional Law is like, one 4-credit class in your first year of law school, so it’s not going to change your life. And you could go to the very best law school with the very smartest Con Law professor of all time, only to find out that your half of the entering class has to take Con Law from the Dean’s retarded stepson.
Going to a top law school is meaningful in two ways:
1) as I said above, it helps put you on a career path where you’ll immerse yourself in constitutional law, serve clerkships with top federal judges, and otherwise develop your intellectual abilities in this area; and
2) Better law schools tend to have smarter students. If you got into Harvard, then you’re probably (but not necessarily) a smart person. Major firms hire from Harvard, not because it’s the only place to find bright lawyers, but because there are MORE of them there than at other law schools. The #1 graduate of UT law school might not be any smarter than the #1 graduate of SMU law school, but the talent pool is deeper at UT.
I’m not sure how much the second factor even applies when you’re talking about an era where women had fewer opportunities in the legal profession and probably got discriminated against in the admissions process.
On the whole, I don’t think the law school is that important. I certainly wouldn’t go off the deep end like Coulter and claim that it’s some kind of disqualifier. The thing about Miers is, her law school isn’t a disqualifier, the fact that’s she’s never been a judge isn’t a disqualifier, none of the negatives that have been brought up are really a disqualifier. But when you combine all those things together, ehhhh, she’s definitely on the low end of qualified at best.
You don’t need to have an all-star resume like John Roberts to get on the Supreme Court (and if he wanted to be perfect, he would have needed another 10-15 years on the federal bench). But someone of Supreme Court-caliber should have at least SOMETHING impressive in their background, and she really doesn’t. It’s certainly an insult to everyone’s intelligence for the President to claim that she’s the “most” qualified for the job.
scs
Okay, thanks, Steve, I’ll accept that. That was very informative. You answered my questions on Con Law, as I take it that you are saying that Con Law is not all that hard to learn, as you say it’s only one class in Law School.
My other question is, if Meirs had been appointed a judge by Bush a couple years ago, which he easily could have done, like he did for Roberts, would people have considered her qualified now? Can any old politically appointed judge be considered qualified? Or do you have to have some standard of good writings in your opinions as a judge to be considered a good pick? And so do you also disagree with putting politicians on the bench now or would you think its okay as long as they have a distinguished political career?
Bob
I don’t get it. I don’t want to put right-wingers into “fits of apoplexy.” Maybe I do, but it’s generally not my intention. If I disagree with them, I want those people to actually understand my point, maybe even convince them of its rightness. Sometimes I give up and tell them to fuck themselves, but I don’t get this apoplexy thing. It suggests some kind of sadistic desire that, if one wanted to be a better person, one might want to examine and address.
As a person who wants to live in a socially responsible country, I find myself attracted to this blog in an attempt to understand why bullying and taunting is such fun for self-identified righties.
What is the mechanism? Why does it make you feel good? Just curious.
As for the Right’s rejection of Miers, is this the first thing that they noticed? How’s Ann feeling about the prosecution of the war against scary things (aka terror)? Their handlers need to give these people need new scripts.
BoDiddly
This has all the makings of a “Quag-Meier”
And Coulter has always struck me as a woman I’d love to marry–but to whom I would probably hate being married.
Kimmitt
It’s really just very, very funny to watch conservatives suddenly start pretending that they have ever given a ratfuck about competency as versus ideology.
demimondian
I wouldn’t say that. Most prominent constitutional lawyers have considerable experience outside the classroom, and most serious candidates for Supreme Court justice have clerked for a justice, taught Constitutional law, or served on the bench — often, in fact, having done all three of these. (For instance, Ginsberg, Souter, and Roberts.) In addition, most have argued before the Court previously, as Ginsberg and Roberts both had.
The one class in law school is enough to give a broad basis in Constitutional law — but it’s hardly enough to give one a mastery of the subject.
TheocracyIsComing
It’s even more funny to watch the rabid right have a circular firing squad.
JoeTX
Thanks for saving the effort of typing a comment on annhag, you pretty much summed up my thoughts exactly!
Why do people worship those that can spin the best, nobody values honestly anymore!
jobiuspublius
Hmm, is Bubbles a George Will fan?
ROFLMAO. Rove and corporate amerika “elected” Worst-POTUS-Ever. Suckers. Swift Boat Veterans for Hiding Salami did more than those trench dwellers did.
Hehehe, we can see what really makes her the bubbling bitter witch she is. She’s stuck among the turkeys, the small brains, doing psyops and it’s so natural for her.
Bubbles Coulter: Hiding the Salami, since birth.
jg
Good points but wouldn’t smarter students also allow for a tougher, more comprehensive curriculum which graduates better prepared lawyers? Being able to acually accomplish something in class is a good thing for a teacher. The better the student, the less time spent rehashing trivial matters, the more time spent getting deeper into a subject.
the friendly grizzly
I find her strident and shrill most of the time. I have heard her on the radio and her tone is that of someone armed with a law degree, swiftly approaching the change of life, and carrying what writer Fred Reed calls “The Chip”.
I’m too old to likely see it, but the younger folks reading this will be either amused or shocked to read Ann if: a) she lives long enough and b)is still in syndication, when she reaches Helen Thomas’s age and level of senility.
BoDiddly
No, guys, what’s absolutely hilarious is to see the left’s reaction (and the reactions of those who claim to be in the “center”) to dissent and conflict within conservative ranks, rather than engaging in the DNC’s brand of numb groupthink.
Maybe the idea of “individual thought” scares them.
Com Con
Exactly. Who care where she went to law school and whether she seems like a “major brain” or not? What’s that got to do with being on the Supreme Court. She’s a person the president can trust. That matters a heck of a lot more than whether she can recite old case law before the Senate committee.
donald
Ann Coulter is not hot. She is a too skinny, bad hair, chain smoker.
Gratefulcub
Which is it?
a)Democrats all think and say the same thing
b)Democrats have no spine and stand for nothing, no one is ever on the same page
It can’t really be both
Tim F
Diddly,
You should blog more often. I found your Katrina I and II posts to be very careful and thought-provoking. It would be interesting to know your thoughts on Rita, reaching cat 5 as it did only a few weeks after another cat 5 hurricane passed through the Gulf.
Com Con
Diddly, I also liked your blog. Those quotes from the rap songs really put the whole Bennett tempest in a teapot into perspective. Why is it that rappers can say all the racist stuff they want to but Bill Bennett says one thing that gets misconstrued and suddenly he’s public enemy number one? Could it be because of liberal control of the media?
Com Con
It is both. They’re spineless when it comes to standing up to terrorists, but they’re tough as nails when it comes to going after anything and everything Republican. There’s no contradiction.
Steve
Clarence Thomas comes to mind as someone who didn’t have a particularly amazing resume (mostly, appointed head of the EEOC) before he was named a federal judge for a couple years. Let’s just say that reasonable people can differ over whether he was qualified or not, but those couple years as an appellate judge do make a heck of a difference. Without that, it would have been very difficult to claim he was qualified at all.
Having brought that up, I should say that Thomas has proven himself to be more than qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, even though I tend to disagree with him as a political matter. The point, I guess, would be that sometimes you can only tell in hindsight.
Oh, and what demimondian said above is true as far as constitutional law goes. I didn’t mean to suggest that it’s something you just pick up in a couple weeks. The thing about law school is, people picture it as a process where you sit there and professors tell you what the law says, but in reality the important part is learning the thought process, how to break a legal question down into its component issues and “think like a lawyer.” The concepts are more important than knowing what the case of Calder v. Bull says.
Krista
a) She will. That’s what happens when you sell your soul.
b) I wonder if you can go senile if you’re already batshit crazy?
c) Helen Thomas is getting up there, but she’s had one hell of a career and I think she deserves a bit of respect.
Another Jeff
.
OK. With all due respect, she’s a senile old hag.
Is that better?
Krista
Another Jeff: not really, but that’s okay. I only hope that someone shows you respect and kindness when you’re a senile old fart.
donald
How bout a lying, senile, despicable old hag?
Com Con
ROFLSHIAC, Another Jeff and Donald. Very solid description of Comrade Thomas.
Krista
Glad to see that your fine minds and strong political convictions are being applied towards the righteous cause of denigrating elderly women.
Sojourner
So you’d be the first to sign up to have surgery done by a doctor who had one course in surgery in med school?
Com Con
A traitor is a traitor, no matter the age and gender.
Another Jeff
It’s Friday Krista, lighten up. Helen Thomas is a public figure.
Besides, hockey’s back. Aren’t you Canadians supposed to be happy?
Krista
Another Jeff – Okay, okay. She’s a public figure, so of course you have every right to criticize her. I just really admire the fact that she broke a lot of ground for female journalists.
Hockey? Oh yeah…that. :)
Sorry to disillusion you, guys…I enjoy a live hockey game, but I really couldn’t care less about the NHL. I AM happy, though. This weekend is our Thanksgiving, so after a week of utter craziness and 12-hour workdays, I get a long weekend.
Another Jeff
Well then “Happy Thanksgiving”.
And i prefer hockey live as well. Plus, now that they don’t fight as much, it’s not as fun to watch.
Steve
I don’t know a lot about med school, but I know a lot about law school, and I think this analogy kind of exemplifies the misconceptions a lot of people have about law schools. You don’t generally learn the nuts and bolts of what the law says in law school, you lean the general concepts and how to think like a lawyer. For the most part, you learn the details of what the law actually says during the summer after you graduate, when you’re studying for the bar.
In fact, the better the law school you go to, the more theory you learn, and the less nuts and bolts. So if you were forced to hire a recent law school graduate to defend you in court, you might actually do better with someone who just graduated from the local city law school – where they would have learned state law and the details of civil procedure – rather than someone from the Ivy League who knows all about normative theories of penology or whatever.
Krista
Another Jeff – yeah, live hockey is definitely a good time. There, I won’t give you a hard time any more today now that we’ve agreed on hockey, and now that I’ve finally gotten some lunch into me. (Mmm…donair pizza.)
Don
I don’t know that I think that’s so different from any challenging field. The value of what I learned studying computer science wasn’t any one language or database, it was the basic concepts of computational analysis and how to represent things in databases. Circumstances have caused me to learn a lot about one little section of law that the average lawyer might not know off the top of their head, but I couldn’t write a brief of make a concerted argument. I’ve learned more about one particular medical ailment than my doctor at one point or another in the past but I couldn’t diagnose a steady stream of people in a day.
School is school and experience is experience. Neither is a replacement for the other in a lot of fields.
Com Con
Medicine is about technical facts, but I thought that the law was about right and wrong. Why do you need a fancy degree to tell right from wrong? Some of the smartest people are also the most confused about morals. Look at the universities.
Another Jeff
That’s actually an interesting point. If you had to name the three top defense attorneys here in Philly, two of them went to Widener Law School, and one of them went to Temple, neither of which are giants in Law School Land.
So, if i committed a murder, i’d want them to defend me, but I wouldn’t want them on the Supreme Court.
Is that the point or am i missing something? (and despite my earlier snark directed at Helen Thomas, that’s a serious question. I’ve often wondered why a lot of the top attorneys in the city didn’t go to the best law schools. Of course “top attorney” is kind of ambiguous. I’m sure some of the most financially successful never set foot in a courtroom.)
DougJ
I think that the ones who go the top laws schools are likely to do corporate work that involve writing contracts, helping companies avoid taxes etc. I have about a dozen friends who went to Yale law school and none has ever done any trial work. Frankly, they’d all be terrible at it, unless the jury was composed of other elite law school grads.
jg
I have absolutely no reason to trust the presidents judgement. None.
Slide
Com Con incredibly said:
Com con is a perfect case study of the failure of our educational system..
Steve
Don, I’m not sure I agree, based on your example, that “school is school,” only because I think law and computer science are virtually identical disciplines. The methods of problem-solving and breaking down complex tasks into their component parts look much the same, only the tools are different.
I guess my overall view would be that an undergraduate degree in history is not much different from a degree in literature which is not much different from a degree in political science, but all of them are very different from getting certified as an auto mechanic or learning how to drive a truck. Maybe med school is all a bunch of theory and you learn all the important stuff during your residency, but I always assumed there was a little more meat to med school than there is to law school.
jobiuspublius
So, Bubbles is a Luttig fan. (Roberts, Hamdan),(Luttig,Padilla),(Scalia,Duck Hunt)
BoDiddly
Tim F and Com Con, thanks for the kind words.
Little by little I’m finding more time to post (and more time to organize my thoughts to try and build a meaningful post), so maybe I won’t be quite as sporadic in the future.
Right now, I’m trying to get a grasp of css–a couple lines here and there that I am trying to change the color on, and can’t find the code to save my freakin’ neck. After I get it polished, I’ll be able to post a bit more.
Thanks again, and keep checking back.
jobiuspublius
Oooo loookie, Bubbles is piling on the Freakos too. Cool, we’ll get a Bennett and a Bubbles book for christmass. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Larry
Harriet told Frum that W is the smartest man she’s ever met.
This is judgement?
Be afraid.
Be very afraid.
Rome Again
Sure, if you think that SCOTUS should be an echo chamber of the Presidents who appointed them… but wasn’t SCOTUS supposed to be an independent branch of government, supposedly a check and balance on the President?
The U.S. Constitution – Separation of Powers (Checks and Balances)
Oh, silly me, who am I to think that any branch of government (such as our President) should have any checks and balances?