Sympathy for the Devil's Fawning Lackey

I have a shameful secret to confess: I'm actually starting to feel sorry for Harriet Miers.

The bad news just keeps piling up for her. Some of the more recent developments:

• She blew the only constitutional question she answered;


• She failed to pay bar dues in DC and Texas;


• She "collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp....after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay" (via Josh Marshall;


• And now Chuck Schumer says she only has one or two votes on the committee, and the White House is reportedly engaging in non-discussion discussions about withdrawing her (via firedoglake).

Maybe it's that I'm saving up all my Schadenfreude for Rove and DeLay. Maybe it's because I'm expecting her replacement to be a Roberts-style RoboNominee with impeccable and untraceable right-wing convictions. But it's also that to me, she doesn't really seem like a bad person. She's a wack job, no question (on abortion and gay rights, for starters), and in a better world neither she nor anyone with her core beliefs would be allowed within 100 miles of the Supreme Court; and she seems to have engaged in one or two shady practices along the way. Still, besides having shown a certain amount of common decency along the way, she just doesn't seem competent enough to be truly deserving of our loathing. And the kind of humiliation and public ridicule she's now subjet to--the humiliation of someone who is in way over her head in a very public polition--well, I find it hard to watch anyone go through that, short of someone like Rove or DeLay or Bush himself.

And in the end, I don't think she did this to herself. Bush did this to her--not deliberately, of course, because he thought he was doing her a tremendous honor--But he did it to her all the same. In his blind pigheaded insular arrogance, his scorn for any quality other than blind loyalty to Himself, he put her in a position where massive public humiliation was inevitable. In that sense, at least he's in the same boat as most Americans: just another victim of Bush.