Patting Her on the Back and Attaching a "Kick Me" Sign

In an article in the New York Times, Matthew Scully explains that Harriet Miers is qualified for the bench in part because she's been a diligent fact-checker for Bush's speeches.

I don't dispute that Ms. Miers may ultimately become a fine SCOTUS justice (like all Democrats, I'm sitting back to get a full view and revel in a bit of well-earned schadenfreude), but I don't see how fingering her as one of those accountable for Bush's breezy handling of the facts helps her cause:

It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X "our most urgent domestic priority," and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.

...and the world suffers, in part for all the counterfacts that Harriet missed. Out of the frying pan of the unknown into the fire of the blameworthy.