The Bible is quite clear on this point: Female lawyers are not be trusted with the disposition of funds contributed by conservative donors to endowed university lecture series. I’m only surprised the regents at SMU didn’t get it. If it had been Southern Baptist University, I’m sure none of this would have ever happened.
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I. Extremists
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October 6, 2005
WB: Feminist in the Woodpile +
Comments
R.J. Rushdoony was still around in the 90s. Did Harriet invite him? He would have told those uppity women what their rights were. I guaranty they would have included the right to remain silent.
Posted by: Dan | Oct 6 2005 19:31 utc | 2
I think I’ll petition Lehey to vote for her. She might just be a Cheney/Bush’s judicial faux pas.
Posted by: Juannie | Oct 6 2005 21:33 utc | 3
check out billmon’s latest post ala 6:55. I hear a thundering roar of champgne corks popping!
Posted by: possum | Oct 6 2005 22:00 utc | 4
re indictments, wayne madsen writes:
After it was reported that Karl Rove had agreed to give further testimony to the Grand Jury investigating the CIA leak, Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin denied his client had received a target letter from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a formal “heads up” sent to individuals who are about to be indicted. However, it is being reported from well-informed sources throughout Washington that 1) target letters have been sent to Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Ari Fleischer; 2) Rove has agreed to testify and possibly agree to a plea bargain agreement in return for his testimony against other targets of the criminal probe; 3) Cheney and Bush may be named as unindicted co-conspirators; 4) Bush’s “war speech” before the National Endowment for Democracy and a late Thursday afternoon report that “19 operatives” have arrived in New York City to place bombs on subway trains are blatant attempts by the White House to divert attention from the impending indictments against the Bush White House. The main stream media is just beginning to take notice that a “Watergate-level event” is about to occur in Washington.
Posted by: b real | Oct 6 2005 22:11 utc | 7
I can hear that train a’comin’.
Comin’ down those railroad tracks.
Yeah,I hear that train a comin’.
Thunderin’ down those railroad tracks.
It’s the Turd Blossum Special
Slipping that knife in Georgie’s back!
(raging harmonica now…)
Posted by: possum | Oct 6 2005 22:14 utc | 8
Right after the GW’S Speech we get:
New York City Subways Placed on Heightened Alert Over Threat
This the train you singin about possum?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 6 2005 22:31 utc | 9
I would have trouble actually believing that our Boy King would appoint another pal this soon after Michael Brown, but I guess this entire country is in an irony-free zone. Another crony??? Are you kidding??? Guess not.
Posted by: Stfish7 | Oct 6 2005 22:34 utc | 10
I can hear that train a’comin’.
Comin’ down those railroad tracks.
Let the Midnight Special shine it’s light on me.
Let the Midnight Special shine it’s ever-lovin’ light on me.
Posted by: Billmon | Oct 6 2005 22:52 utc | 11
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please…
Posted by: PeeDee | Oct 6 2005 23:03 utc | 12
This kind of thing is just the icing on the cake, really. What must these fundies think of a 60-year-old, childless, never married woman. Never mind the idea that she could be a lesbian — I’m sure they suspect that. She put her career before family. For a man, that’s OK enough, although a man is still expected to at least have a family.
But a woman’s job, to them, IS family. She went without that, and built a political career as a lawyer – a man’s job. To them, she should be at home baking cookies and scrapbooking the grandkids. Not having had a “family” by their definition is not just unusual or a quirk. It’s essentially ungodly. The Right despises the very idea of a Harriet Mier.
Posted by: NickM | Oct 6 2005 23:33 utc | 13
Oops, Miers – if it were Mier, they’d despise her more!
Posted by: NickM | Oct 6 2005 23:37 utc | 14
NYC terror alert? Don’t they have anything else?? Besides the indictments me thinks polling not looking too good in Virginia and NYC.
Posted by: +/+ | Oct 7 2005 2:54 utc | 16
Dang this is funny Billmon! I liked that colatura voice change midsection.
Did you know that it’s sometimes now called “women studies”? At least where I work that’s how it now goes. I reflexively lean forward to correct the new title, then catch myself, pause, and wonder, Why?
Posted by: Trilby | Oct 7 2005 3:08 utc | 17
It shows how even a well intentioned conservative can be led astray without real institutional expertise. — Stanley Kurtz
So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due administration, the typical modern university is in a position, without loss or detriment, to dispense with the services of any board of trustees, regents, curators, or what not. Except for the insuperable difficulty of getting a hearing for such an extraordinary proposal, it should be no difficult matter to show that these governing boards of business men commonly are quite useless to the university for any businesslike purpose. The governing boards – trustees, regents, curators, fellows, whatever their style and title – are an aimless survival from the days of clerical rule, when they were presumably of some effect in enforcing conformity to orthodox opinions and observances among the academic staff. At that time, when means for maintenance of the denominational colleges commonly had to be procured by an appeal to impecunious congregations, it fell to these bodies of churchmen to do service as sturdy beggars for funds with which to meet current expenses. So that as long as the boards were made up chiefly of clergymen they served a pecuniary purpose; whereas, since the complexion has been changed by the substitution of business men in the place of ecclesiastics, they have ceased to exercise any function other than a bootless meddling with academic matters which they do not understand. The sole ground of their retention appears to be an unreflecting deferential concession to the usages of corporate organization and control….
The fact remains, the modern civilized community is reluctant to trust its serious interests to others than men of pecuniary substance, who have proved their fitness for the direction of academic affairs by acquiring, or by otherwise being possessed of, considerable wealth. It is not simply that experienced business men are, on mature reflection, judged to be the safest and most competent trustees of the university’s fiscal interests. The preference appears to be almost wholly impulsive, and a matter of habitual bias. It is due for the greater part to the high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth at large, and especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the guardianship of any institution of learning. Business success is by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business affairs. …And, full of the same naïve faith that business success “answereth all things,” these business men into whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the responsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in these matters with which they have no special familiarity.
Posted by: Thorstein Veblen | Oct 7 2005 4:59 utc | 18
How about a chorus of:
“They’re goin’ to Fulsom Prison and they ain’t comin’ back”
Posted by: mm | Oct 7 2005 5:16 utc | 19
Harriet turns out to be quite a tease, hasn’t she?
Not bad for a 60-year old gal.
Seriously: she’ll be loyal to the Capo. The rest don’t matter. The wingnuts are fools, but then that’s always been the case in fascist regimes.
Posted by: Lupin | Oct 7 2005 6:08 utc | 21
I have been following the appointment of Ms Miers with some interest. It seems so illogical. Look at the long term grooming job Turdblossum, Inc did with Patricia Owen! It was a 3-4 year project for lesser judicial post. Then look at the rabid religious right with “Just Us” Sunday I and II gearing up to get her nominated and intimidate competition and criticism. Turdblossum, Inc was a smooth running hate machine back then, coordinating ultrarightest factions that usually hate each other into a real powerhouse! Why has this machine crumbled in so short a period of time? The cause must be more than a piece of calcium stuck in a self loathing self hating I-Am-NOT-Gay political advisor’s urethra!
I saw wear and tear in the process during Robert’s pre-coronation, but this is absurd! It is a base line meltdown. And with the foundation crumbling, fractures are running through the right wing machine.
What amazes me is some of these alliances lasted so long. If Rove is a genius (and still probably will be the smartest man in his cell block), it has been shown in how he kept cantankerous factions together for so long. The Religious Right for example, is fickle, demanding ally. The Christians that make up the religious right are spiny and not very cuddly with each other. No one hates a conservative Latin Mass Catholic more than a Independent Baptist Fundamentalist, but they both hate Sun Myung Moon more than each other! Yet they been in the same bed for a decade! The fault lines here are deep and I hear rumbling. And while there have always been knotty groups of right wing nuts from the John Birch Society to the Federalist Society to the KKK to Wallbuilders and Christian Identity, the Rovian miracle was to get these independant and intolerant individualists to march in cadence while he beat the drum. I suspect these days are over. These alliances were artificial at best because they were alliances with the RNC and not really each other, and the RNC can never deliver! Their base is more moderate than those who hold center stage in the media. They can never afford to overturn Roe vs Wade, they can never really create a theocracy, they can never reverse decades of civil rights legislation (they can spit on pieces of it) and they cannot alienate their real financial base, pragmatic and self-centered corporate interest groups. The best they can do is push hot buttons and deliver scraps of meat, not whole meals, to their more rabid but loyal hounds.
Furthermore, they can never win the war in Iraq. They are doing their best to look like they are in control, but they simply are not. I honestly believe that if Bush had it to do over again, he would have had Ahmed Chalabi executed before he opened his mouth, consolidated his victory in Afghanistan (which he has still not done) and would have worked towards Central Asia to secure oil resources. And Donald Rumsfeld would be in some harmless post in Disneyland. And the PNAC would be scrapped. I think the Chimp in Chief has the capacity to learn, but he learns very slowly. When he’s 90 and writes he memoirs, they should prove to be interesting if he’s capable of being honest. Perhaps you think I give him too much credit. Ah, that’s just sentimentality and compassion, a bad American habit.
But back to Ms Miers before her cookies burn. Her nomination is a turning point. I think historians will look at this as the day the machine broke down. Doesn’t mean that Democrats have anything to gloat about. They are still the PC Keystone Cops and they still lack a vision and a real plan. I am a new advisor to a group of campus Democrats. I asked them, “What are Republicans?” and I got a chorus of confidant chirps, though many of the songs were worn out and some were simply wrong. When I asked this same group to identify themselves as Democrats, well, it was awfully quiet.
Posted by: Diogenes | Oct 7 2005 12:33 utc | 22
It seems more likely that this lecture series was taken over by doctrinaire feminists who shut out conservative views . . . It shows how even a well intentioned conservative can be led astray without real institutional expertise.
isn’t kurtz saying that you can count on those radical lesbos to head out into the general population in search of converts? “led astray” … hehheh…
Posted by: mc | Oct 8 2005 11:09 utc | 23
Mier getting “borked”
Robert Bork – whose nomination to the high court was rejected by the Senate in 1987 – called the choice of Miers “a disaster on every level.”
“It’s a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you’re on the court already,” Bork said Friday on MSNBC’s “The Situation with Tucker Carlson.” “It’s kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who’ve been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years.”
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Posted by: Austin Baumann | Dec 4 2005 23:20 utc | 25