I continue to be amazed that these writers don't understand the value of appointing people you know and have confidence in. Reading them you would think that Bush should appoint complete strangers to key positions.

OJ,
Bush is the dunderheaded blueblood in this administration.

Anyon know how well he knew Roberts before nominating him?

Sterling resumes ain't all they're cracked up to be. Ask John Kerry. Here, Bush is skewered for puting greater weight upon character and what he knows first-hand about a person rather than in a stack of glowing resumes. Folks like Mr. Baker put faith and trust in resumes. 'W' apparently favors real people.

Supposedly he'd met him a couple times and struck up an immediate rapport.

Bartleson:

Thank goodness the voters still like us.

Roberts didn't know the President of course but Roberts was very well known in the Washington legal AND political community. There were many people who could vouch for his solidness.

Think of Miers as the domestic Condi Rice. Miers and Rice are one of the very few aides who spent personal, not political, time at Camp David. I think the President knows her views pretty well.

So much of the complaining I've read and heard sounds a lot like Red Sox fans getting in an early workout for the off-season second-guessing once their team get swept this week, except I'd assume most Red Sox fans voted for the Vietnam Vet There's a petulance in the "how dare he not just pick my favorite, but not anyone else's favorite, either" as if these Stupid Party Conservatives still haven't figured out that the guy does not make decisions based on polling.

By not going with the smartest, most elite candidates favorited by the talking heads and law professors and others in the Legal-Industrial Complex, it's almost as if he's taken Bill Buckley's "I'd rather be goverened by the first names in the phone book" and applied it to picking a Supreme Court judge.

Maybe a lot of pundits had more money wagered in their Supreme Court nominee betting pools than what was being antied up on this site. (Actually, I think more than money, a lot of it was the ego they wagered -- getting two straight nominees wrong after literally years of compiling their own personal candidate lists and touting them for all to see can be both a little irksome and bruising to your sense of self-importance.)

Having a SCOTUS justice who thinks the Constitutional answers to questions brought before them aren’t nearly as difficult as the activist-judiciary legal system wants them to be should prove rather refreshing actually.

On the nomination, this sight, Hugh Hewitt and beldar.blog are the only sane ones I've seen. We really are the stupid party. I had thought that lable was a joke.

Considering Buckley's statement, it makes the implosion over at NRO that much more amusing.