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Intellectual dishonesty
Last Sunday, former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist showed his knack for creative writing in a Tennessean
op-ed supporting his former legislative director and current judicial
nominee Gus Puryear. Neglecting to mention the nationwide press
criticism Puryear has endured, Frist characterized the opposition to
his appointment, about which the Scene has written extensively,
as merely “political posturing,” and urged a return to a “bipartisan
model” of confirming judges, an act of shamelessness that would rival a
Paris Hilton ode to chastity.
“When I served as a majority leader of the Senate, I saw firsthand the political circus that can accompany judicial nominations,” he wrote. “Some of my colleagues threatened to filibuster obviously well-qualified nominees.”
Then again, Frist and other Republicans didn’t have a problem playing partisan politics when there was a Democrat in the White House. In 1996, the Belle Meade politico voted to filibuster a judicial nominee President Clinton appointed. When Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation asked him about it a few years later, Frist stuttered and stammered and came off about as eloquent as when he tried to diagnose Terry Schiavo from the Senate floor.
“Filibuster, cloture, it gets confusing—as a scheduling or to get more information is legitimate. But no to kill nominees.”
Frist definitely could have used an editor. The former physician also wrote that the American Bar Association unanimously “rated Gus qualified to be a U.S. District Judge,” neglecting to note that his friend’s rating actually falls in the bottom 20 percent of Bush nominees. The ABA gives most of Bush’s prospective judges a “well-qualified” rating—a step above the one it gave to Puryear—so obviously the group had some issues with our nominee’s lack of meaningful courtroom experience.
Frist also foolishly promoted Puryear’s phantom “broad bipartisan support within Nashville and Washington,” citing the endorsement of Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But the former senator failed to mention one little detail: Almost all of the Nashville Democrats who support Puryear just happen to work for a law firm that bills CCA, where Puryear works as the corporate counsel. And as for Marshall, he serves on the CCA board and owns stock in the company.
It would be news if he didn’t support Puryear.
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Our
favorite—OK, our only—liberal talk radio show has found itself on the
money end of a John McCain Google ad buy. For the past week or so, John
McCain for President banner ads—both horizontal and vertical—have
graced the website of Liberadio, where both the on-air and blog
expressions of the beloved Mary Mancini and Freddie O’Connell appear.
It’s the result of the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign (the dunces) buying ads on sites that capture their keyword criteria. Needless to say, they need a narrower set of criteria.
“Thanks for clicking on it, because every time you do we get money,” an amused Mancini says.
Where’s that reverse gear?
Gov.
Phil Bredesen, apparently pouting because no one likes his idea for a
superdelegate convention, now is trashing both Democratic candidates
for president. He told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “What scares
me the most this year is that this is a tough election and McCain has
enormous appeal. It would be a tough race for either Democratic
candidate in Tennessee…. That’s sobering to me.”
In an interview last Friday, he said that position was illustrated by a conversation he had recently in a restaurant near Chattanooga.
“Four guys in a booth said, ‘Phil, sit down, we voted for you,’ and so I did,” said the two-term governor, a moderate Democrat in a right-leaning state. “And one of them turns to me and says, ‘We’re all Democrats, who are you going to vote for? Hillary or Hussein?’ ”
The governor also helpfully volunteered that Democrats running in Tennessee are distancing themselves from both Obama and Clinton. “One of the superdelegates said to me, ‘I’m in a swing district and both of them are poison to me,’ ” Bredesen said.
Gee, who could that superdelegate possibly be? The name Lincoln Davis springs to mind.
In the Chattanooga Times Free Press Tuesday, Bredesen added that he disagrees with Obama’s remarks about small-town people, guns and religion. But he backtracked a little from the Inquirer interview, saying the guys in the restaurant were probably Republicans and that “it is certainly possible” for Obama or Clinton to win Tennessee in November.
So Bredesen and Obama have something in common: saying things they wish they hadn’t.
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