Will Gets Fired Up
Amidst all this vacation blogging, The Dylanologist, who remains on duty, must link to George Will's excellent piece on the Miers nomination. Finally, after years of betrayals from this president on issues ranging from social spending to immigration, even tepid, equivocating conservatives like Will are awakening to the fact that "their man" in the White House might not be on their side after all. He reserves some of his most scathing comments for Bush's mindless deference to the "diversity is our strength" mantra:
"Under the rubric of "diversity" -- nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses -- the president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation. Identity politics holds that one's essential attributes are genetic, biological, ethnic or chromosomal -- that one's nature and understanding are decisively shaped by race, ethnicity or gender. Categorical representation holds that the interests of a group can be understood, empathized with and represented only by a member of that group.
The crowning absurdity of the president's wallowing in such nonsense is the obvious assumption that the Supreme Court is, like a legislature, an institution of representation. This from a president who, introducing Miers, deplored judges who "legislate from the bench."
