Un-QuagMiered

Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush ended his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court Thursday and promised a quick replacement. Democrats accused him of bowing to the "radical right wing of the Republican Party."

The White House said Miers had withdrawn her name because of a bipartisan effort in Congress to gain access to internal documents related to her role as counsel to the president. But politics played a larger role: Bush's conservative backers had doubts about her ideological purity, and Democrats had little incentive to help the nominee or the embattled GOP president.

The withdrawal stunned Washington on a day when the capital was awaiting potential bad news for the administration on another front — the possible indictments of senior White House aides in the CIA leak case. Earlier in the week, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq hit 2,000

The interesting thing to me here is how the story is covered -- here's what Bush says,but here are the real reasons; and we weren't expecting this bad news, we were expecting this other bad news.

Next we will get a foam-at-the-mouth son (or daughter) of Robert Bork, and the battle will be joined. The Democrats' keep-the-powder-dry strategy worked well, but now I think they are going to need every ounce of that powder.