Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Laura Bush Talks



She was interviewed, together with George, by Matt Lauer on the NBC's Today Show. Among other topics she opined on the troubles of the Harriet Miers nomination:

Q Some are suggesting there's a little possible sexism in the criticism of Judge Miers. How do you feel about that?

MRS. BUSH: That's possible. I think that's possible. I think she is so accomplished, and I think people are not looking at her accomplishments and not realizing that she was the first elected woman to be the head of the Texas Bar Association, for instance, and all the other things. She was the first woman managing partner of a major law firm. She was the first woman hired by a major law firm, her law firm.

This is not going to sound well in Wingnuttia, not well at all. In fact, the Wingnuttia are all about making accusations of sexism totally impossible because they are politically correct and politically correct is BAD. And ungodly and in case equality of the sexes would be totally against the plans of the wingnut god. So I think Laura made a mistake.

But a different question is whether sexism indeed has some role to play in the Miers debacle. I have sort of answered that earlier when I wrote about how hard it is for your average incompetent woman to get to the places where your average incompetent man is frequently found, wielding power that he is not able to, and later on many rightwing blogs showed quite clearly that they are unhappy with Miers not because she has never been a judge or because she is not known as a writer of great legal treatises or because she is a crony of the president but because she doesn't have testicles. So yes, sexism is still around.

But not all the opposition to Miers is about her sex, or even most of it. Maybe we have advanced a little bit in this respect?