October
11, 2005
Bush, Miers Never Talked Abortion?
By Richard
Cohen
Back in
the civil rights era, a transplanted New Yorker living in North
Carolina named Harry Golden published an odd newspaper called
``The Carolina Israelite.'' With the keen eye of an outsider,
he noticed that while whites would not sit down with blacks at
lunch counters and other places, they would stand with them in
bank lines or supermarkets. So Golden concocted the ``Vertical
Integration Plan'' which mocked racial segregation and which,
to my surprise, is apparently known to George W. Bush, the president
of us all. He has adopted it to discuss abortion.
You think
I jest, but I do not. A careful reading of the White House transcript
from the president's recent news conference strongly suggests
that Bush will not discuss abortion while sitting down, but might
while standing up. Let's go to what Bush said when he was asked
if, over the course of his long friendship with Harriet Miers,
he had ever discussed abortion with her: ``Not to my recollection
have I ever sat down with her.''
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Miers, of
course, has been the White House counsel and a longtime member
of Bush's legal team -- both in Washington and, before that, in
Austin. She was the one who helped him vet judicial appointments,
including the most recent and momentous of them, the elevation
of John Roberts from federal appellate judge to chief justice
of the United States. It is impossible to believe that Roberts
and others were discussed without either Bush or Miers mentioning
abortion. They must have stood the entire time.
There is,
however, another possibility: code. It's conceivable that Bush
and Miers developed a secret language for talking about abortion.
For instance, when vetting judicial appointees, Bush might have
asked, ``Is he pro-banana or anti-banana?" Miers would then
look around, point to the walls (which have ears even in the White
House) and say, ``anti-banana." Then she would take another
file from the pile marked ``anti-banana" and recommend that
person to the bench. Bush, knowing the code, might then ask, ``Where
does he stand on late-term bananas?" or ``bananas on demand?"
or something really clever like that. Maybe this code was developed
by George Tenet, late of the CIA and the recipient of a presidential
medal for getting nearly everything wrong about Iraq. The CIA
knows some dandy codes.
The clever
use of code words or the ability to stand for a long time while
discussing abortion might seem far-fetched, but there is no other
way to explain the assurances that the very important James C.
Dobson has offered his fellow conservative Christians regarding
Miers. ``When you know some of the things that I know -- that
I probably shouldn't know -- you will understand why I have said,
with fear and trepidation, that Harriet Miers will be a good justice,"
he told his radio listeners. Then, referring to aborted fetuses,
he added, ``If I have made a mistake here, I will never forget
the blood of those babies that will die will be on my hands to
some degree." So said the founder of Focus on the Family
about a Supreme Court nominee who has none at all.
Deconstructing
what Dobson has said, it's clear he has received assurances that
Miers is not only anti-abortion -- that's a given -- but that
she will smite Roe v. Wade when she can. Dobson said he has not
talked to the president about this, but he has talked with Karl
Rove. Whatever the case, Dobson seems to know something that even
the president pretends he does not know --and, of course, is not
known to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, either. What's
more, you can bet that when the senators ask, they will be told
by Miers that she cannot answer because the issue is likely to
come before the court. (Also, she will be sitting down.)
All of this
is a ridiculous charade. The president makes the abundantly unqualified
Miers seem even more unqualified -- a clerk of some sort with
whom he would never discuss weighty matters. It is all a soft
lie, an odd folkway of this place called ``Inside the Beltway,"
where everyone talks in code and no one ever says what they mean.
This odd recourse to feints and fibs demeans the process by which
the nation's most important judges are selected. What Harry Golden
would make of this, we will never know, but I'd like to think
he'd dust off his old plan and tell the president to just sit
down. That way, the truth may come to him.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
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