Demagogue

Commenting on Harriet Miers' withdrawal today, the National Review looks ahead and editorializes:

If President Bush now nominates someone whom most conservatives can support, as he should, then Bush and the conservatives may, together, win the nominee's confirmation.

... The Democrats will insist that the far Right has forced a nominee beholden to it on a weak president.

Did the editors of NR have a response for this Democratic argument? No.

But taking on the Democrats, even Democrats armed with that argument, still seems the best option. Republicans still have a majority of the Senate. If Democrats mount a filibuster, Republicans should be able to break it one way or the other. Republicans will need only two members of the "gang of 14" who made the filibuster deal to prevail.

So it would appear that NR essentially agrees with what Dems are likely to conclude -- "that the far Right has forced a nominee beholden to it on a weak president." The only point NR is making here is that GOP senators just have to use their majority status to "break" any Democratic resistance and force through an ultra-conservative nominee.

I guess it's too much to expect that NR would come clean and just write: "The Democrats will insist that the far Right wanted to force a nominee beholden to it on to a weak president. And they'd be right."

There was a time when one would have expected a more thoughtful rejoinder from a magazine that has long claimed to be the publication for conservative intellectuals (a term that seems increasingly oxymoronic these days).