L'Infame: Supreme Call

Poor Harriet Miers. When all else fails—experience, intellect, ballast, literacy (David Brooks today calls her writing a “relentless march of vapid abstractions”)—call in the gods. She has religion, our Lord and Savior President tells us. Not just any religion. None of your pansy Catholic confess-and-you’re-absolved-of-all-adulteries kind that John Roberts wouldn’t discuss, but the hardcore evangelical kind, the kind that gives James Dobson and his Focus on the Fanatics congregations collectively tumescent seizures equaled only by the sight of abortionists, fags and other liberal species burning auto-da-fé style, with Lee Greenwood songs for Te Deums and billboard backdrops by Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Funny thing about reconstituted conservatives. They’ll preach free market and self-reliance all day long but don’t hesitate a second to call for spiritual welfare, pull the God card, equate blind faith with presumptions of trust the moment their earthly powers fail them. But “fanaticism and contradictions are the prerogative of human nature,” Voltaire tells us (“le fanatisme et les contradictions sont l’apanage de la nature humaine”). Our Lord and Savior is not about to contradict him.