Hugh Hewitt's Piece on The Damage Done by The Conservative Miers Opposition

Read it here. I don't think this is one that Laura Ingraham will be reading triumphantly on the air today, with occasional high-pitched giggles from her sidekick Lee. Disagreement with the host is simply not part of that show, at least not on the Miers issue.

The key graph from Hugh's piece:

The right's embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left - exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources - will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around. Given the overemphasis on admittedly ambiguous speeches Miers made more than a decade ago, conservative activists will find it difficult to take on liberals in their parallel efforts to destroy some future Robert Bork.

Hugh raises an interesting and undeniable point: The next time liberals savage a Bush nominee to the bench, and try to deny that nominee an up-or-down vote, will George Will be in any position to complain? Will Laura? Or Rush? Krauthammer? Hannity? Fund? Frum? and so on?

Those folks have taken themselves out of the game. That's a real loss, because collectively they are obviously powerful and effective voices.

We'll all hold our breath and hope Bush can come up with a nominee whom the anti-Miers people find acceptable. I will never feel the same about those people, but as a conservative Republican I'm still happy to make common cause with them for a strong nominee.

UPDATE: Laura Ingraham had a mutually congratulatory interview this morning with George Will. It was actually pretty funny (not that Laura intended it that way). Laura said she thinks Harriet Miers was treated fairly, and that Miers would have fared worse had she not been a woman.

Really? Caligula's horse? Bush's "office wife?" Barney the dog? A "medocrity?" If it's fair to call Miers those things, then George Washington was a monkey. And we won't say anything about Laura's condescencion regarding Miers' sex.