| Friday, October 21, 2005 |
| Swiftboat Veterans Against Harriet Miers |
Among the myriad ironies in the disastrous Harriet Miers nomination, this one surely beats all: by nominating his insufficiently qualified crony from Texas, George W. Bush has done more than just damage his standing with his base -- he essentially has "Swiftboated" himself; drawing the most vicious of the Kerry slanderers back out into the open and reopening perhaps the biggest gaping wound in his own checkered history: his spotty service in the National Guard.
John Fund breaks down the latest Bush agonistes.
The politics of the Harriet Miers nomination are getting stranger as attention turns toward Ms. Miers's tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. Two key players in last year's presidential campaign--Jerome Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans book "Unfit for Command," and Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor who claimed President Bush got special treatment when he joined the Texas Air National Guard--are involved in the debate.
In a plot twist worthy of "Dallas," Mr. Barnes is effectively siding with President Bush's appointee, while Mr. Corsi is opposed. Mr. Corsi has written a half dozen Internet stories on the Lottery Commission scandal, while Mr. Barnes is calling the offices of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and urging them not to question Ms. Miers about the Lottery Commission because it will prove embarrassing to him and other Texas Democrats. Meanwhile, an October 10 story in the NY Sun goes in-depth on the man who could become the Miers' nomination hearings' star witness.
Ironically, much of the detail on the Texas lottery scandal is coming from what once was a Bush allied site: right-wing World Net Daily ... plus more on the site from Jerome Corsi himself. A year ago, would you ever have expected to read a paragraph like this coming from the heart of the Swiftboat conspiracy:
Why would George Bush want to nominate the only person in the world who would open up the Texas Lottery scandals and the question of whether Ben Barnes used political influence to get him into the Texas Air National Guard? By nominating Miers, Bush called an artillery strike on his own position, something we doubt he learned in the National Guard. Corsi -- his ruthless smearing of kerry aside -- spins a tale of broad political payoffs that go well beyond whether Ben Barnes was handed a fat, no-bid lottery contract in order to shut him up about Bush's Guard service. He also tacks right back to the story that made the word "pajama" sinonymous with "Dan Rather" and "forced retirement":
CBS was obsessed with Bush-hatred. That's the only explanation for why anyone would forge documents. The story of the Bush National Guard cover-up was always right there, hidden in plain view, as Edgar Allen Poe would remind us.
Then, sometime before 1997, somebody wrote an anonymous letter to U.S. Attorney Dan Mills in Austin, Texas, revealing the ties between George Bush, Ben Barnes, GTECH, the Texas Lottery Commission and how George Bush used influence to get into the Texas Air National Guard. The letter mentioned Reggie Bashur, who at that time was George Bush's chief of staff. The anonymous writer claimed that Bashur made a deal with Barnes that Gov. Bush would not allow the GTECH contract to be opened to competitive bid as long as Barnes kept quiet about having used influence to get Bush in the National Guard. Anonymous letters are always suspect. Still, when GTECH decided to hire Bashur as yet another high paid lobbyist, eyebrows are raised.
The letter also named Robert Spellings, claiming that he was talking about the National Guard story, making "a lot of people nervous."
Who is Robert Spellings? He was chief of staff for Ben Barnes both from 1966 to1968 when Barnes was speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and again from 1969 to 1973 when Barnes was lieutenant governor of Texas. He then turns up in Washington, married to Margaret Spellings, who President Bush swore in as secretary of education in January.
He even delves into the world usually trod only by what he calls "Bush-hating bloggers":
Everywhere we look there's another skeleton. GTECH, the Rhode Island company running the Texas Lottery, was formed in 1981 and backed by some of Bush's biggest financial backers in Texas – none other than the Bass brothers and their money manager, Richard Rainwater.
... Just go to any Internet search engine and type in "Spectrum 7" or "Harken Oil" and you will find tons of left-wing bloggers claiming that Richard Rainwater is the major reason George Bush is a multi-millionaire. Rainwater allegedly put up the money to buy out Bush's debt-ridden oil company, Spectrum 7, during the 1985-1986 crisis when the price of oil fell to $9 a barrel.
Then, according to the Bush-hating bloggers, Rainwater was the angel who funded Harken Energy to drill in Bahrain. Oh yes, Rainwater also evidently put up a good chunk of the $86 million needed to purchase the Texas Rangers. Bush-bashers then note that the future president's contribution to the baseball deal was some $500,000 that he borrowed from a bank he had once directed.
The person who vetted Harriet Miers at the White House should be fired for incompetence. But, then, the person who vetted Miers was Bush himself. ..."
If Bush is taking this much fire from within his own ranks, and is forced to rely on the restraint of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to save his nominee, is there any way to argue that elevating yet another crony to a position of power -- this time of the lifetime variety -- was worth the cost of undoing the most successfully quashed story of the 2004 campaign?
But once again, we're left with options for the president that don't look good: he could withdraw Miers under fire, and appear weaker than he does now, by meekly handing his al-Qaida (Arabic for "the base" you know) their Janice Rogers Brown or Michael Luttig (with the absurd caveat that one of them is the second-most qualified person for the Court. Or he could withdraw her and flip the insurgents within his party the bird by giving them Gonzalez, or as I offered before, his father. But if he were to do that, he would sever himself from his base forever. Third, he can hunker down and slug it out, in which case Miers probably gets onto the Court, delivering a stinging defeat to the conservative movement that could resonate for many, many years.
So many bad choices, such strange bedfellows.
Tags:Harriet Miers, Supreme Court, Politics, SCOTUS, Law, News, Bush |
posted by JReid @ 6:14 PM   |
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