Yeouch

George Will runs his rapier through the Miers nomination. Will seems to put the pick down largely to a cave on the part of Dubya to identity politics, while I still believe it probably has more to do with cronyism, but his reasoning for rejecting the nomination is pretty sound. (There! I said it! I think she's a poor choice!)

UPDATE: BTW, I'm not completely convinced that this isn't some kind of stunt, that Miers might have been, well, a deliberate wild pitch. I'm not saying I believe this yet, just that I haven't dismissed it as being beyond the realm of possibility.

UPDATE DEUX: Jonah's G-File today nicely sums some theories behind Dubya's pick and the dilemma it has created:

But President Bush has put himself in the awkward position of asking his base to trust him at precisely the moment the base was expecting Bush to demonstrate their trust was well-founded in the first place. For this reason and others, the Miers nomination has opened up several crisscrossing fissures on the Right: East Coast credentialists vs. outside-the-Beltway populists, Bush loyalists vs. conservative-movement activists.

The press will spend a lot of time wondering what the Democrats will do. But for now the more interesting question is, what will the Republicans do?

Emphasis mine. This seems to be the basis of the bulk of the criticism coming from the Right, at least what I've seen of it. As I say in the comments, whether the hissy-fitting is justified or not, the White House should have seen it coming. Either it didn't, which is worrisome, or else it did and chose to ignore it, which would appear to lend some credence to the charges of arrogance being hurled about, and certainly strikes me as something of a political gamble.

YIPS from Steve:

JT on Meirs:

Mr. President, I've supported you on a LOT of issues. I've taken my share of crap about it, and I've never complained. But there are a few places I won't stick up for you. The first is your abandonment of the issue of border security. The second is your spending our money like a drunken Kennedy (but I repeat myself). And the third one is your judgment of other people.

To cite three examples: appointing Michael Brown head of FEMA without discovering he had padded his resume'; naming and keeping Leon Panetta on as Secretary of Transportation; and your saying "you've looked into Vladimir Putin's soul" and trusting him. Sorry, sir, but three strikes and you're out. I don't feel I can rely solely on your sense of personal judgment about other people.

Yes, except the pesky issue of Norm Minetta being the incompetent triple-token Transportation Secretary, instead of Leon Panetta, who while I disagree with on most ideological issues has a distinguished record of public service.

My beef with all this is the missed opportunity for a Transformative Appointment to the Court: the party at the national level has one three sucessive national elections for the White House, the Senate, and the House. Now is the opportunity to get our William O. Douglas or Hugo Black on there. People keep saying, "sure, there have been lots of Supremes who haven't been judges before" (like Douglas and for all real purposes Black for that matter), but it's annoying to keep lumping the former Chief into that category. No, Rehnquist hadn't been a judge, but he had clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Jackson. The whole conservative legal movement has spent the last generation focused on building this network, and to now not use it, well, it's baffling. It's Truman-esque in many ways.

Color me unimpressed and unpersuaded. Does this mean I'm going to take my vote and go home? Oliver and his minions can dream on. But am I happy? Not by a long shot.

UPDATE from Steve:

John at Wuzzadem blows the lid off of all this...

UPDATE DEUX from Steve:

Dr. Rusty weighs in with the Meirs/bin Laden connection, plus a photo which is going to lead to some pretty bad pshopping....