UPDATE:

I was trying to write this comment on this site and it was saying so much clearer what I wanted to say in this post I decided to add it as an update.

This is all inside baseball and egos to boot. To believe Bush made the wrong pick assumes either he is stupid, or she is a liberal plant under cover for 15 years, or some combination of the two.

What the pundits are upset about is simply they do not know her. They are so insecure they have their own litmus test that cannot be violated. Bush has never swerved from nominating the kinds of judges the conservatives support. They just simply do no know Miers and were not allowed to give their blessings.

For being ignored the chattering class are stomping their feet in anger. They are not as connected as they thought and not as omnipotent as they thought.
And they are not handling it well.

Every negative concern is founded on baseless speculation and assuming the President is too stupid to know better, or is also a stealth liberal.

Gimme a break. The only damage being done is to the conservative chattering class. The rest of the country could care less about all this noise. When Miers speaks we will get the essence of the person ourselves. We don’t need interpretors.

Tony Blankley takes a more humorous jab at this issue here.

END UPDATE

There are so many posts on this topic I will not even pretend to link to them all. One of the best is by The Anchoress covering all the silly hand wringing from the right. I also want to address the abysmal behavior of weak kneed conservatives who, in their ignorance of Miers, exposed their lack of confidence and respect of Bush.

All the negative comments from Michelle Malkin, Tony Snowe, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh (yesterday) and others are from the same root causes.

The first problem appears to be an arrogant feeling Bush needed the concurrence of these pundits for his selection. All the critics are irritated they do not know Miers’ bona fides. Well who cares? Like pundits are the only ones who know every single prominent candidate? Where is your support to Bush? Why not hold your negative comments until more became known? The answer is rather obvious I am afraid.

And never mind the fact these pundits blab everything they learn, which makes it highly unlikely Bush is going to let this crowd in on the plan. They represent the last group to be told right before the political opposition.

They all seem upset their own pet candidates did not get the pick. And the rationalizations regarding their irritation are all over the place. It is even clear these critics are simply irritated that they were shown up to be not such great experts with such not such great connections.

An example of an irritating complaint was the desire for elitist university credentials to offset the unknowns surrounding Miers. Riiiight! Like a Harvard Law Degree is more of an indicator of a non-Souter than 15 years of day to day personal experience.

It has been a load of crock that we have been listening to for two days on why these experts feel it OK to slam Bush – and all who disagree with them! The most common excuse goes back to Miers as an unknown. This is then followed with the obligatory comparison to Souter and O’Connor, who turned out to be less conservative than expected. The irony in all this is Bush obviously decided his safest selection was someone he knew intimately. So there was no reliance on the opinions of others (many of whom are armchair experts and strangers anyway). That is how we ended up with Souter! The personal attacks about cronyism used in the same breathe as complaints that Miers is a risk because she is an unknown is the epitomy of ridiculousness. She is not an unknown to Bush.

And this is where the entire ugly episode exposes a lot of faults with the current conservative chattering class. For all their hand wringing, what these fair-weather supporters did was turn on the President out of insecurity and irritation because they were out of the loop. They did not know anything about Miers, so naturally they assumed the worse about her and Bush!

For the Miers-is-the-next-Souter scenario to play out two things have to be true: Miers is really an evil liberal in conservative clothing hiding out for 15 years, and Bush is a dunce too stupid and reliant on his buds (cronies) to know any better.

If they believe Bush is intelligent and dedicated to the cause, Miers must not be a liberal plant or else he would figured it out. Too bad this line of reasoning missed so many ‘experts’.

The least problematic of the naysayers are the ones who claim it is not likely, or is minimally possibly, Bush was duped. They simply ‘hope’ Bush did not screw it up. Great. Therefore they think there is a good chance Bush was duped, they just hope not.

Pathetic. All this because the talking heads are uninformed, because they know less than Bush does about Miers as she relates to the other candidates and the political realities. Let this independent conservative remind these pundits that many of us find these leaps of illogic clumsy, cowardly and insulting to the cause. We despise the ‘Bush is dumb” meme from the left, so why would we tolerate it from the right? Face it, to buy into all this doom and gloom requires one to assume they know more than Bush.

Bush made a surprise selection based on information we do not have access to. He does the same thing day in and day out in the war on terror and protecting America. And conservatives never scream they were uninformed about those decisions. They trust him to do the best he can.

But in this one situation, Bush was relying on his supporters to remember all he as accomplished and to have some faith (the glass is 80% full compared to what two Gore terms would have wrought, something the naysayers forget). For everything Bush was not able to pull off (school vouchers) he has 5 related things he did get done – against the desires of Congress and the media. But now none of this matters. 80% is now a failure.

So when Bush presented his nominee, did his supporters take the time to learn about the nominee? Did they respect his right to make the selection? Did they give him the benefit of the doubt as opposed to the standard ‘Bush is Dumbya’ we hear from the left?

Nope. These insecure, weak kneed conservatives turned on him and acted like James Carville, instead of the better role model: Ronald Wilson Reagan. The same conservative icon who, like Miers, was once a card carrying democrat. Moreover, Reagan’s prime directive was to never speak evil of other conservatives – let alone our national leader.

Fair weather friends indeed. When this and this are your allies, and Bush and conservatives who are keeping their cool are your opposition, it is probably a good time to consider where all those leaps of illogic have landed you.

UPDATE:

Check out this article as well at The American Thinker [Hat Tip: Academic Elephant]

And definitely check out this post at Random Jottings which lists all the conservative success under Bush – something we would never have predicted in 1999 or had any hope for under Al Gore.

And another reasoned analysis here at Justus for All – so refreshing from the wildly panicking speculations of the end of the world from the right.

And Don’t miss Beth’s profane and profound thoughts here (I like a person who tells you squarely were you fit with them).