Eating Itself

Like a pack of wolves, Republicans are turning on President Bush. Across the airwaves and in print, words like “liar” and “betrayal” and “incompetent” have been flying from the very same sources that used to defend him. Harriet Miers seems to be the straw that broke the elephant’s back.

But critics from his own party fall into two very different camps. Both call the Harriet Miers nomination a bad mistake, but after years of feeling obligated to endorse fiscal recklessness, invasion planning errors and rampant cronyism, some are retracting their prior positions, now criticizing this same trail of Presidential blunders. These seem to be the moderates, who can no longer hide their disdain for such a bungler, especially with the ’06 election cycle approaching. By distancing themselves from the Bush disaster, they hope to preserve the old-Republican positions of fiscal responsibility and small government.

The other group, radical religious Republicans, are apoplectic that Bush nominated Miers over one of their carefully groomed and vetted Appellate Court Judges, despite the fact that Miers, too, is a devoted evangelical. This group isn’t as willing to criticize the Bush track record, but questions his commitment to a strict constructionist court. Feeling that the Supremes have been legislating from the bench, they want state legislators to have more power, because their radical agenda would be repugnant to the nation as a whole. They hope to carve out little pockets of theocracy, bigotry and intolerance in a few key states where they have the votes to do so, aided by a new Supreme Court.

This second group, the radical religious right, spent the last five years in the center of political discourse because their voting block made the difference between victory and defeat for Bush. But despite their numbers, they are neither a majority nor mainstream. They are radical fanatics, and while their dream of a narrow court may come true, the blunders and ineptitude of their poster child, President Bush, so egregious that his own party is turning on him, all but ensures that their political sun is setting. Amen.