Boy, this is fun. I’m not sure when the last time was that I was able to enjoy mocking a lame Bush appointment at the same time I was able to enjoy Bush being roasted for same by his right-wing base.

On a more abstract level, it’s also interesting to me to see how much the most frenetic part of the modern media universe (meaning weblogs, mainly) truly abhors a vacuum, and rushes to fill it.

Items helping to fill the former Miers-information vacuum today:

• Just deleted from David Frum’s blog – Ben Wikler of the Al Franken Show weblog notices that former White House speechwriter and good conservative David Frum posted the following about Miers, then quickly edited his posting to remove it. Oops! Too late!

She rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush. I mentioned last week that she told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. To flatter on such a scale a person must either be an unscrupulous dissembler, which Miers most certainly is not, or a natural follower. And natural followers do not belong on the Supreme Court of the United States.

• All I need is you: The psychology of George and Harriet – Nice discussion from the Bag of this image of Harriet Miers touring the Crawford ranch with the Brush-Clearer-in-Chief.
• Why Miers? – Kevin Drum has some interesting speculation. Short version: Bush picked her because he’s a wimp. (Or, as the Bag would put it, because he’s “a weak man consumed with power” who “has no choice but to constantly remind others what a man he is,” and hence surrounds himself with two kinds of people: those he depends on “to quietly tell him what to do,” and those he depends on “to make believe he knows.”)
• Bush bashing – a round-up by Kevin Drum (again! again with the Kevin Drum!) of conservatives’ angst over their betrayal.
• Harriet Miers’s Blog!!! – heh. This was fun.

So, Bush is nothing if not consistent. With a crucial, high-profile position to fill, one that could have a profound impact on the nation’s future, he disdains actually sifting through the country’s best and brightest. Instead, he chooses a personal friend, someone who combines absolute loyalty to himself with a notable lack of relevant qualifications.

I’m referring, of course, to Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

More on Miers:

• Wikipedia entry
• transcript of Bush announcement

From the latter:

Once again, we consulted with Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate. We received good advice from more than 80 senators. And once again, one person stood out as exceptionally well suited to sit on the Highest Court of our nation.

I wonder how many of those senators included Miers in their list of suggested appointees. From the New York Times article I linked to above:

Mr. Bush said this morning that the White House had consulted 80 senators to seek names in the selection process. But last week, Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the judiciary panel, said that it was “consultation in name only” and that Ms. Miers called him to ask for suggestions in a conversation that lasted less than five minutes.

“There is no back and forth,” he said. “It’s just, ‘Give us some names.’ I said to her, ‘Look, I’d like to know who the president is considering.’ And she didn’t say anything.”

Heh. So, Miers came back to Bush after calling the senators, and gave him the list of suggestions, and he just glanced at for a second, then said, “Aw, heck, Harriet. Why don’t you do it?”

A few more fun quotes:

From a New York Times’ profile of Miers, written a few years back by Elisabth Bumiller (A woman of low profile in a job high-powered):

In 2001, Mr. Bush brought Ms. Miers to Washington with him as his staff secretary, a little known but powerful job in which she handled much of the paper flow to the president. Ms. Miers is a regular guest at Camp David and is often the only woman who accompanies Mr. Bush and male staff members in long brush-cutting and cedar-clearing sessions at the president’s ranch.

And this, from Joshua Micah Marshall (As with Justice Roberts…), quoting Matt Yglesias quoting David Frum:

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.

Whoa. In the Bush scheme of things, that’s the most unimpeachable qualification there is.

Finally, let’s read from her acceptance speech at the announcement of her nomination. I’m getting a real Sally Field vibe from this part:

And now I want to pause and thank all of those whose love and friendship and support have brought me to this moment. No one reaches a point in time such as this without tremendous sacrifice, help and encouragement of family and friends and colleagues.

I’m immensely grateful to the support and love that I feel for my brothers Harris, Robert, and Jeb, and their families, and the love and support that I knew from my father and my sister, Kitty — and the love and support I feel from her family.

I have a special note this morning for my mom: Thank you for your faith, your strength, your courage, your love and beauty of spirit.

You know what’s hard about being ignorant? The gaps in my knowledge don’t stand out like big white areas on the map. The brain, in its wonderful way, just closes up those empty spaces, making them disappear.

It’s like what happens to the area in your visual field obscured by your blind spot. You can verify that it’s there by covering one eye and moving a card with a pair of dots around until one of the dots disappears. But unless you make the effort to expose it, you’re not aware that you’re missing anything.

So with Iraq. We’re all ignorant to a greater or lesser degree about what’s going on there. But we’re not really aware of the extent of our own ignorance (though we of course have a crystal clear notion of the other guy’s ignorance; that stands out in flashing neon).

So let’s see if we can fill in some of that terra incognita. But first, consider the following quotation from Gen. George W. Casey, Jr.’s testimony before Congress on Friday, as noted by Kevin Drum:

Asked whether the insurgency has worsened, Casey said it has not expanded geographically or numerically, “to the extent we can know that.” But he noted that current “levels of violence are above norms,” exceeding 500 attacks a week. “I’ll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success,” he added.

For some reason that strikes me funny. I realize it’s a deadly serious subject (more literally so than usual), but still, there’s something about the old military man, conditioned to deliver information accurately and succinctly, who I’m guessing has now been ordered to lie by his civilian overseers. And like Hal in 2001 (at least as revealed in 2010), he ends up exhibiting some pretty wacky behavior in his effort to reconcile the conflicting requirements.

Asked if the insurgency has worsened, and faced with the clear fact that it has, he does his best to find a way to put a positive spin on it. But unlike someone like Rumsfeld, who would simply set sail on the sea of falsehood and lie, saying something like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Of course not. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Casey feels compelled to keep one foot on the shore, so to speak.

Okay; maybe it’s not so funny.

Anyway, here’s some of the actually informative stuff I’ve been reading about Iraq lately:

• The view from Iraq – an on-the-ground report from Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), whose district I mostly grew up in, and for whom I have voted in the past, though I haven’t been her constituent for a number of years.
• What’s wrong with cutting and running? – from retired Gen. William E. Odom, head of the NSA during the Reagan administration.
• Can the US military presence avert civil war? – by Jim Lobe. Lobe is what our conservative friends would refer to as a “liberal.” You have been warned.
• Why immediate withdrawal makes sense – by Michael Schwartz. Schwartz, likewise liberal, is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

  Fill in those blind spots, people!

Kevin Drum pointed me to this item I’d missed in the LA Times: Study: Adept liars’ brains are built differently.

People who habitually lie and cheat — pathological liars — appear to have much more white matter, which speeds communication between neurons, in the prefrontal cortex than normal people, the researchers found. They also have fewer actual neurons.

The differences affect a portion of the brain, located just behind the forehead, that enables people to feel remorse, learn moral behavior and plan complex strategies.

The surplus of connections between neurons might enable these people to be more adept at the complex neural networking that underlies deceit.

Lying is hard work and these brains may be better equipped to handle it, the researchers said.

“Lying is cognitively complex,” said USC psychologist Adrian Raine, the senior scientist on the research project. “It is not easy to lie. It is certainly more difficult than telling the truth. Some people have a biological advantage in lying. It gives them a slight edge.”

The researchers recruited 108 volunteers, then sorted them into groups based on psychological tests designed to determine how often they lied. The volunteers were then scanned using magnetic structural imaging to obtain detailed anatomical images of their brain tissue.

The group of compulsive liars had 25.7% more white matter in the prefrontal cortex and 14.2% less gray matter than the normal control group.