George Will on Harriet Mier

According to Rod Dreher of National Review's Corner, George Will's column of this morning
was supposed to be the final nail in Harriet Miers' coffin. I accordingly approached Will's piece with some trepidation. What I found was a suprisingly intemperate screed against Ms. Miers and anyone who dares support her. It is so emotional, so full of sneers and condescension and internal inconsistency that I did not know where to begin in responding.

President Aristotle has taken care of that for me. His post is perfect. I cannot think of anything to add. You must read the whole thing. And I'd love to see a reasoned conservative response to the points President Aristotle makes. If you read the comments to his post the only support there for George Will (at this writing) is from someone who descends into silly name-calling. (I have blogrolled President Aristotle at left. It's a well-written blog; read it whenever you can!)

HT: Hugh Hewitt, who adds another must-read deconstruction of Will's column from a consitutional law professor's perspective.

Read 'em both.

UPDATE: After Dafydd ab Hugh's breakdown of Will's piece at Big Lizards there is not much left but a smoking bow tie on the ground. Also, John Hinderaker at Power Line seems to be cooking something up that will appear soon in The Standard.

UPDATE II: Here is John Hinderaker's Weekly Standard piece. Key graphs:

REPUBLICANS HAVE LONG TAKEN the position that, because it is the president's prerogative to select Supreme Court justices, any nominee who is qualified and doesn't subscribe to an extreme judicial philosophy should be confirmed. Some Miers critics seem now to imply a new standard by mocking Miers as undistinguished, or by pointing out how much more qualified other potential nominees would have been. Such attacks carry a hazard. Until now, the judicial confirmation process has never been seen as one where senators can reject a qualified nominee on the ground that he or she isn't the nominee the senators wanted, or the one the senators consider the best.

But many conservative critics of Harriet Miers come perilously close to urging that standard on Republican senators, in hopes that, if Miers is defeated, the president will go back to the candidate pool more favored by conservatives. But, once a handful of Republican senators have used such a rationale to vote against a Republican nominee, it requires little imaginati on to foresee how quickly the Democrats will use that precedent to justify their own opposition to essentially any Republican nominee, no matter how well-qualified or mainstream.

This is compelling to me. What's the anti-Miers response?