"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Monday, October 03, 2005

I’d like to take a moment to coin a new phrase:  Brownie Moment.  A Brownie moment can be defined simply as the moment when a supporter of President Bush is smacked in the head by reality and loses any and all faith in the president from that moment forward.  As you may have surmised the term comes from Bush’s recent comment regarding former FEMA head Michael Brown’s leadership in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

This was my Brownie moment.  I understand that in the world of politics leaders often have to say things they don’t mean, or shake hands with dictators and scumbags, and do a lot of morally repugnant stuff.  But when Bush said that I realized that after surveying the impotent, incompetent response of the federal government he truly, honestly believed that Brownie was doing a heck of a job.  That sealed it for me.  I’d been turning sour on Bush for a while, but I was still generally supportive of him.  When I heard him make that remark, however, that was it.  That was my Brownie moment.

I bring this up in light of the Miers nomination.  There are a whole lot of head-scratching Republicans gazing at each other wondering what the hell just happened.  Could Bush really have nominated this woman to the Supreme Court?  Yes, my friends, he just did.  I imagine there are a whole lot of conservatives out there today who have just had their very own Brownie moment.

This is not to say that having had a Brownie moment the lack of faith in Bush is irreversible.  Far from it.  If Bush were to straighten up, get his act together, and really make an effort at becoming the president he was in the first three years of his first term then I would in all likelihood get firmly behind him again.  But in the wake of the deteriorating situation in Iraq, his political impotence at implementing his agenda, the profligate expansion of government under his watch, and his failure to veto a single bill during five years in office, the Brownie comment was just too much. 

That was my Brownie moment.  And there’s a whole country full of gobsmacked Republicans who just had theirs this morning.