Frank Rich gets it!!!

I'm really really really angry with The New York Times today. Why you ask? Because Frank Rich's excellent column is behind the wall. Yes I read it, no I haven't paid the $49.95 but I do have a friend who sent it to me.
Today Rich explains why the Miers nomination has not gone over well. In short it's because when Bush says "trust me" hardly anyone does anymore. I'll give you a few snippets and hope that The Times doesn't send one of Scooter Libbey's thugs over to smash my keyboard or break my fingers.

As we really noticed during the Katrina debacle one of the problems is Bush is so completely out of touch. As we already knew he is out of touch because he is spoon fed the news by a staff who are terrified of giving him bad news or telling him anything he doesn't want to hear. The result as Rich sees it:

Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers. "The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Such naked presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for news are members of your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home. You can even believe that Brownie will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate four days after the storm's arrival - and only then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser, Dan Bartlett, asked the president to turn away from his usual "objective sources" and instead watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news reports.

He decides in advance the nature of reality and nobody will tell him any different. Harriet Miers is the one person most qualified to sit on the Supreme Court because I told you so, "trust me". Well not even the evangelicals are drinking that koolaid anymore.

Though James Dobson, America's foremost analyst of the gay subtext of SpongeBob SquarePants, was easily rolled by Karl Rove and dragged back into the Miers camp, he's an exception. The pervasive mood on the right was articulated by Cathie Adams, president of the Texas branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. She told The Washington Post: "President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in God."

This is a sea change. If anything, Ms. Miers's record of opposition to abortion (a contribution to Texans United for Life, a leadership role at a strenuously anti-abortion church) is less "unseen" than that of John Roberts, whose nomination aroused no protest on the right only three months ago. The difference between then and now is a startling index of the toll taken by a botched war and hurricane response on whatever remains of Mr. Bush's credibility. The continuing inability of the administration to accomplish the mission in Iraq and of its post-Brownie FEMA to do a heck of a job on the Gulf Coast has inflicted collateral damage on its case for Harriet Miers.

The only thing Bush really ever had going for him was that people trusted him. Well, they don't anymore so there's not much left.