Posts Tagged ‘Harriet Miers’
The First Ever SWIA Award
I am mentioned 10 times—more than even Jane Fonda or Betty Friedan–by the anti-feminist Kate O’Beirne in her book Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, which was endorsed–surprise–by Peggy Noonan, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham, This must mean I am doing something right. With those credentials as well as being an afficionada of Keith Olberman’s nightly “Worst Person in the World” shtick, I have decided to start my own award for the stupidest women in America (SWIAA ™).
O’Beirne, has the hubris necessary to claim the right to worldwide judgment. Humble person that I am, I’m planning to highlight only the stupidest women in America. And because as everyone knows I am inherently biased toward liberals, I’ll let Olberman slide this time.
My first SWIAA™ award goes hands down to Harriet Miers. Miers, the former White House Counsel who was George W. Bush’s obviously underqualified and clearly doomed token female nominee for U. S. Supreme Court who was quickly withdrawn so he could pick the white male Justice he really wanted. She continues to stand by her man with her mouth clamped shut while Congress slaps her around.
Read MoreHarriet Miers: Is the Right protesting too much?
Last week, I happened to see a lawyer who runs an association of women judges and has a long history of national leadership in the legal field. She basically knows everyone who is anyone in the legal profession. I asked her what she thought about Miers.
“Well”, she replied in all seriousness and after some thought, “she’s not a monster.”
This hit me like a ton of bricks–that in this era of hard-right conservative grip on our nation’s political institutions, “not being a monster” could be a qualification for the highest court in the land—the United States Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the Constitution, the nine men and women who decide how laws can intrude upon or enhance our lives, our liberties, our fundamental civil rights.
Read MoreHarry, Sam, and the Incredible Vanishing Woman
Here’s what I’ve been thinking lately. What are your thoughts about the Supreme Court nominations?
The cartoon got me thinking. The one with President Bush looking at a free-falling Harriet Miers and saying something like “Somebody had to take the fall, Harriet”, and Miers in mid-air smiling and saying something like “You’re still the very best president that ever was!”
Except for her legal career and the fact she never married, Miers is the very archetype of the 1950’s ideal woman: deferential to men yet cheerfully ready to do their bidding, self-effacing, focused on the minutiae rather than the big problems of the world, a little dowdy in her dress as appropriate for her age, churchgoing. She’s the perfect back-to-the future woman precisely because it can be said that she is professionally accomplished but still has those traditional hierarchical family values that the right-wing loves so much.
Read More