Maybe she's just not that smart

I needed some comic relief following Bush's latest moronic move, so i went HERE. That blog is just an extension of the four columns by Maureen Dowd where she parodies Harriet Miers.

I also read commentary by people gathered at Right Wing News, a proudly conservative blog and dozens of interviews with people of all stripes who are concerned about Miers' nomination.

The overarching impression I am left with is that no one thinks she's particularly smart, but they don't want to say that out loud, so they just talk about her career and hope the reader will reach that conclusion independently.

But the most shocking comments of all I've read come not from justices and judges and lawyers and conservatives, but from Tucker Carlson, an interviewer, in his interview with Robert Bork:

CARLSON: Yes. A fascinating point, brought up this morning by Charles Krauthammer in his column in the Washington Post. He said that, for four years, Meirs has been immersed in the war and peace decisions while working at the White House — questions of prisoner detention, prisoner treatment, war
powers et cetera — and he makes the point, if she does reach the Supreme Court, he’ll have to recuse herself from judging the constitutionality of these decisions because she will have been party to making those decisions. She won’t be able to weigh in on these vital questions of American life. Is that true, do you think?

BORK: I’m not sure that it is true. Justice Robert Jackson advised President Truman and President Roosevelt on issues like that, and then changed his mind when he got on the Supreme Court in the Steel Seizure case, which held illegal President Truman’s seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War. So I’m not sure that having participated in the decision at the executive branch level disqualifies you from deciding the issue as a judge.

CARLSON: Right. I don’t think it should either.

You don't have to be a legal genius to know that Krauthammer is right. If key members of the Bush Administration, including its military strategists and advisors, ever find themselves before the Supreme Court of the United States, they simply could not be judged by one of their cronies. And as a journalist, Carlson should not only know this, but should not cave in when momentarily dazzled by an irrelevant citation by a prominent judge.