Faith-based Nominee

With the nomination yesterday of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, President Bush has fulfilled his promise to appoint Justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Or has he? The only person who can say for sure seems to be the President himself, who has known Ms. Miers for 20 years as his personal attorney and White House adviser.

For the rest of us, the nominee is mostly a Texas mystery. The 60-year-old has had a worthy career — any woman of that era who rose to lead a Dallas law firm, was elected to head the Texas Bar Association and became White House Counsel is no legal slouch. But when it comes to the judicial philosophy that she would bring to the Supreme Court, she is a blank public slate. Mr. Bush is asking the Senate, his supporters especially, to trust him on this one.

If his track record on judges is a guide, Mr. Bush deserves some deference. His appellate nominees have been uniformly solid, and often distinguished. One of those nominees was John Roberts, who at 50 years old is now the Chief Justice. For five years Ms. Miers has been part of the President's judicial-selection committee that promoted those nominees, and for the last year was its chairman.

The fact that Mr. Bush has known Ms. Miers so well and for so long also makes it unlikely that she is another David Souter, who was sold to George H.W. Bush as a "conservative" by Warren Rudman but morphed into a liberal on the bench. Assorted Texans who have more political credibility than Mr. Rudman — such as state Supreme Court Judge Nathan Hecht — also speak highly of Ms. Miers as a legal mind and assert confidently that she is a conservative constitutionalist.

Editorial
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007357

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A New Era

John Roberts Takes His Seat

As John Roberts honors tradition, his recent nomination process was replete with newly established precedents and deflected partisan tactics. It is now established that Senate hearings and a vote should be held in a timely manner, that not all privileged Justice Department documents are open to inspection by voracious opponents, and, most important, that a nominee should not answer every question asked by a senator. The next nominee's hearing will, hopefully, be free of boorish debate among senators as to what brilliant questions they can properly ask a nominee. The Roberts precedent is now well established: The nominee determines for himself what is appropriate to answer. Putting aside the debate over questions may give us a deeper exchange on substantive issues than we saw in the Roberts hearings.

The Roberts hearings also saw liberals in retreat from litmus tests. No one dared to ask Mr. Roberts the simple question "Are you pro-life?," even while almost every senator was concerned with the issue of Roe v. Wade by any other name. And with two exceptions, Mr. Roberts was not put to a religious test.

Outside the Senate, partisans and activists lost ground. They have cried wolf too often now, in voices too shrill to be credible much longer, if at all. Americans, and the media that shape their opinion, are now also better informed. We know, for example, if we paid attention, that what liberals mean by "judicial activist" is a judge who determines that Congress overstepped its constitutional authority and strikes down a law that liberals like, while conservatives mean a judge who rewrites the law (or the Constitution) as he wants it to be.

Manuel Miranda
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/nextjustice/?id=110007350

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The Bennett Libel Divides the Decent Left from the Indecent Left

It is time now for people with integrity on the Left — and liberal opinion pages — to show their integrity and defend Bill Bennett against the libel of being a racist who advocated the abortion of all black babies.

For make no mistake: This is as pure a character issue as one can imagine. Bill Bennett is not a racist and said nothing that even remotely came close to advocating the abortion of all black babies. This is the dividing line between the decent and the indecent on the Left. The indecent make these charges; the decent will defend him against them. It's as simple as that.

What happened is easy to summarize. In response to a caller who said that America "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years," Bennett made the point that one cannot argue against abortion by pointing out anything theoretically positive that could come from either allowing or outlawing abortion. For example, he went on to say, "You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." And he immediately added, for the sake of those who might distort his meaning, that aborting all black babies would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible."

But talk show host Ed Schultz, whose syndicated radio show is aired on liberal Air America, heard these remarks. He alerted fellow leftist David Brock, who then put the transcript of the Bennett dialogue on his website.

The Left and the world's news media picked up the dialogue and then announced that Bill Bennett had advocated the abortion of all black babies.

This lie is as intentional as it is complete. Sometimes lies contain a kernel of truth; this one has none. In fact, the irony is that if Bennett's social policies were followed, no black babies would ever have been aborted; they are aborted in great numbers thanks to left-wing social policies.

Dennis Prager
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2005/10/04/159247.html

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Don’t Be Manipulated by the Master Marketers

We’re bamboozled daily on a wide variety of subjects, from abortion on demand for any reason to same-sex “marriage.” As David [Kupelian] notes in his new book, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom: “The plain truth is, within the space of our lifetimes, much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped and sold to us as though it had great value. By skillfully playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity and tolerance, these marketers have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which all previous generations since America’s founding regarded as grossly self-destructive — in a word, evil.”

What makes David’s book so useful is the fact that he steps back and allows the other side to explain their game plan, their efforts to change the way you and I think. Take homosexual activists. It looked as if the AIDS crisis of the 1980s would set their cause back, but the activists weren’t about to let that happen.

Some 175 of them met at a conference in February 1988 and hammered out a master PR plan. Two Harvard-educated researchers, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, laid it out in book titled After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s, noting that they would counter negative publicity with “a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.”

That meant relying on established advertising techniques such as “desensitization” (inundating the public with positive, gay-related advertising) and “jamming” (in which the topic of homosexuality is deliberately talked about until it becomes tiresome to normal people). As marketing expert Paul Rondeau of Regent University explained, “If you can get [straights] to think [homosexuality] is just another thing -- meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders -- then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.”

Rebecca Hagelin
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/rebeccahagelin/2005/10/04/159258.html