My local paper carried an AP wire story of Bush’s nomination to the Supreme Court with the headline “Bush taps loyalist for court” and sub-head “Miers has never served as judge.” Yep, nothing like the completely unbiased Mainstream Media to leave you wondering what on earth their opinion is. So Harriet Miers name doesn’t appear in the headline, but a loaded word about her relationship to the White House does. The Associated Press surely knows that it’s not required that a Supreme Court nominee serve as a judge and that others, including Rehnquist, hadn’t; but we have to get that out there in the subhead just so people know what to be incensed about before they read the story.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel like coming to Bush’s defense on this one, and neither do most conservatives as near as I can tell.

Miers may turn out to be a good candidate, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the president had an opportunity that conservatives high and low had been fighting for for a long time. He could have ridden the momentum of the headway we’ve all made against the monopoly liberals once held on American rhetoric. He could have nominated someone that was completely and dependably conservative — there are many good candidates that are amply qualified. And by doing that, he could have announced to conservatives that he understands even if Republican Congressfolk don’t that we won in 2004 — that we have a majority in the House and Senate and don’t have to apologize and constantly go to hostile, unreasonable Democrats with hat in hand, begging them to like us and not be mad. News flash: they don’t like us. Bonus point: they have every intention of being not just mad, but outraged at all times in all ways, because it’s the only thing that makes their nearly insane base stop screaming at them.

And by nominating such a person, he could have made clear to the liberals that the jig is up, that pitching a fit only works if (a) you don’t do it every five minutes, and (b) someone cares what you think. He could have told them clearly what conservatives and other anti-liberals have been telling them now for at least a decade, that they can’t hold the entire country for ransom to their choleric tantrums.

Instead, he left himself open to the charge of cronyism, which may even be accurate for all I know. (I wouldn’t care if I liked the candidate in other ways, and would probably be interested to see how long it took for the griping left to have to admit that they have no problem with one of their own promoting a trusted friend.) And he appeared weak to both the right and the left by making a choice that looks like an attempt to either run from the Democrats or appease them.

It may turn out, as he seems to want to wink to the conservatives, that she’s a stealth candidate, and that, as VP Dick Cheney said on Rush Limbaugh yesterday, in ten years we’ll look back and know what a great appointment she was. But, as Rush said, why wait ten years? We don’t need to employ stealth. Whatever fleeting power conservatives may actually wield right now, we got it fair and square, at the ballot box, in the marketplace of ideas, and hanging in there arguing in the checkout line. We heard all the name-calling and the other furious epithets that the left spat at us with such contempt, and put someone in office to send the message to them that their days were numbered.

But Bush isn’t that guy, as it turns out. Maybe it’s just as well. A person who looked as good on paper as Bush did probably could make you think that Republicans could stop being politicians long enough to take up arms and help us fight the cultural war. No such luck. Looks like we’ve got another decade or two in the checkout line.