Harriet Miers to be withdrawn (by morning?)

[This post was started right after lunch today. Stuff got added as the day wore on. It's now time for bed, but unless something dramatic happens it's all over but the shoutin']

Makes a dramatic headline, doesn't it?
(Tip Randy Barnett at Volokh, see Update)
That's what Stanford professor Robert Weisberg predicts with a measure of confidence.

Miers will not get confirmed by the Senate, because she won’t even come up for a vote. The nomination will soon be withdrawn. Of course, the major reason will be the conservative opposition, but the operational reason will be not the opposition itself but rather the inability of the White House to devise any plan for the hearings. And to explain why, I must speak of the remarkable Arlen Specter.

There follows a convoluted piece of speculation revealing a very fertile but informed imagination. I love this paragraph:

...the point is that the volatility of this convergence of political vectors makes it impossible for the Administration to have a battle plan for the hearings. Compare the Roberts hearing. There was never a chance that he would say anything that would hurt him, and his skill and experience enabled him to exploit a coded but and subtly evasive answers. In fact, Roberts’s career since 1981 had been a brilliant preparation for his hearing, orchestrating the optimal mix of statements and silence to ensure that he could signal his ideas and aspirations to conservatives without becoming vulnerable to liberals. Miers’s situation is now the comic opposite. Roberts was the fine wine subtly aged and blended. Miers is the nightmare mix in a kid’s chemistry set.

Hmm...

"...exploit a coded but and subtly evasive answers...optimal mix of statements and silence...signal his ideas and aspirations to conservatives without becoming vulnerable to liberals."

Is that what we call dog whistle politics?

Is Harriet Miers' problem that she can't whistle?

And who might be responsible for helping pull the rug?
Talk about an optimal mix of statements, silence and signals!

Found this later...

Polipundit: Harriet Miers Must not be Confirmed

Looks like the swarm is forming.

Miers is a documented supporter of “diversity,” a codeword for racial discrimination. She seems to have helped create the White House’s split-the-baby position on this
issue in the University of Michigan cases in 2003, that helped keep affirmative action legal.

Harriet Miers is Alberto Gonzales in a dress. I would not support the confirmation of Gonzales; so why should I support the confirmation of Miers?

Glenn Reynolds has opened a comment thread. That's the blogquivalent of opening a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon.

OTB joins in...I guess if you combine a C student president, a D- congress, and a B+ court nominee, what you get is the complete failure of the Republican party to deliver on anything they promised but were well within their power to achieve. They have proven themselves to be as bad or worse than even the most liberal of Democrats.

I think Anchoress had it right last week. She said Miss Harriet was never meant to be the final pick.

She may not make it to the Supreme Court. Bush may not even intend for her to get there. She may be, rather than the “misdirection,” many expected, an out-and-out decoy, floated to allow both the liberals and the conservatives to blast her out of the water so that Bush can then put up another candidate that both left and right - after having behaved very badly over Miers - will not dare to behave badly over, again.

She got one part right already. That part about "behaving badly." Heck, I don't have a dog in this fight and I'm getting snarkier as the day wears on. Thats bad behavior on my part, too.