David Frum hits the nail on the head this morning with his reaction to the Miers appointment by noting how it fits within a larger framework of Bush appointments:
[It is not] safe for the president's conservative supporters to defer to the president's judgment and say, "Well, he must know best." The record shows[,] I fear[,] that the president's judgment has always been at its worst on personnel matters.
Conservatives have expressed unhappiness with the nomination of Julie Myers for the top immigration-enforcement slot, but there are dozens and maybe hundreds of similarly troubling choices, from the Cabinet on down.
Again and again, George Bush has announced bold visionary policies--and again and again he has entrusted the execution of those policies to people who do not believe in them or even understand them. This is most conspicuously true in foreign policy, but it has been true in domestic policy as well. The result: the voice is the voice of Reagan, but too often the hands are the hands of George HW Bush.
Or worse. George H. W. Bush made his bad appointments in the name of replacing Reaganite "ideology" with moderate Republican "competence." He didn't live up to his own billing, but you can understand his intentions. But the younger Bush has based his personnel decisions upon a network of personal connections in which competence does not always play the largest part.
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