Harriet Miers as a Latter-Day Reagan

Vis Pejman's new blognest this wonderful piece of analysis from Dafydd at Big Lizards.

In my last post, riffing off Captain Ed's Washington Post piece on the taxonomy of the Miers debaters, I talked about the fourth class of conservatives, what I called the Cowboys. These are intelligent but non-intellectual (even anti-intellectual) folks who don't try to articulate their conservativeness... they simply live it. I noted that Bush belongs to this class, rather than to the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, or the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces, all of whom at least have pretensions to being intellectuals.

...there is a very special kind of person found almost exclusively among the Cowboys. For want of a better word, I'll call this sort a Gipper. A Gipper (Ronald Reagan is the prototypical example) is a person who doesn't need to logically reason his way to rightness, because he has an instantaneous intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

Despite so many of Reagan's friends and mentors falling for the Communist line, and despite the fact that Reagan was a New-Deal Democrat, Ronald Reagan never once, not even for a moment, had anything but absolute contempt and loathing for Communism and its kid-sister Socialism. He started fighting the Communists in the 1940s, during the war, while even FDR himself was pedaling the line that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was an enlightened, progressive, scientific, and democratic leader.
[...]
Anybody who knew Reagan for any length of time knew that, no matter what compromise he was forced to accept due to circumstances, Reagan would never, ever "drift to the left," "grow in office," or accept the nearly universally held postulate that Socialism was the way of the future, and the New Soviet Man was the future of Mankind.

Since everyone reading this far is probably both intelligent and pretty intellectual, I predict that you're way ahead of me. George Bush knows Harriet Miers extremely well; he clearly believes that she is not only a Cowgirl but also has an uncanny knack for immediately knowing the right thing to do (from Bush's point of view).

George Bush sees Miers as a female Ronald Reagan: to him, she is a Gipper.

Truly delightful piece of work. (As is the Captain's Quarters link.)
Anyone not already sick of the Miers nomination tempest should take a look into this teapot.

It does my heart good to see cracks in the politically conservative wall. Those of us from the loyal opposition have had so many contacts with disagreeable people that we have to shower after being in public with them. It's a way of life to rub shoulders with extremists, monomaniacs and the rest of the lunatic fringe. Very tiresome. I just hate it when the only people speaking out against bad things don't use deodorant. But when all we hear from "respectable leaders" is a deafening silence what are the choices?