A good point on Mier

There's a rather comical thread on Mier over at Crooked Timber, where the commenters are desperate to argue that a Supreme Court Justice qualified for the job would be positively unAmerican. Amused as I was, it was hard not to get caught up in their thinking and argue in favor of qualified Justices. Fortunately, Matt Yglesias, who is often prone to intellectual masturbation, nails it over at TAPPED:

The problem with Miers is that you have to ask why she was picked. An intellectual superstar might have been picked because she was such a superstar. A straightforward affirmative-action pick would be chosen because of his ethnicity. But Miers seems to have been picked because she's a Bush loyalist. That's a problem. Her lack of apparent credentials is evidence of cronyism, which is bad. But the credentials per se aren't a big deal.

Precisely. There are probably hundreds of people in America who are unqualified on paper but would make excellent Justices. But that's not what Mier is. She's a crony - her only qualification is a 10 year history of sucking up to George W. Bush (and, like him, ignoring warnings about 9-11). And her one-page resume is evidence of that damning characteristic, not the damning characteristic itself.