Ed Morrissey responds to the bitter-enders. His (correct) conclusion: “This failure didn’t start with David Frum putting together an ad-hoc committee to pay for television advertising, and it didn’t start with the blogosphere opining on Harriet Miers’ birthday-card greetings. It started in the White House, where another poor job of vetting a candidate came back to bite the Bush administration . . .”

One of my favorite gonzo essayists, Reihan Salam, has a good, depressing piece up about the closing of the crabgrass frontier. I suspect he’s right: Demographics and economics are conspiring to ensure that my generation will be the first American generation in a long time (maybe ever) to be worse off than our parents.

The dream of middle-class life–a single-family home where parents can raise a couple children and maybe even scrape by on one income–is slipping over the horizon as the real estate boom (bubble?) has created another landed aristocracy. As Salam notes:

. . . those lucky enough to have been in the right time and at the right place have become a new landed aristocracy, enjoying a vast increase in unearned wealth. Meanwhile, the cost of living has become prohibitively high for young families. One might call this “the closing of the crabgrass frontier,” a historical development of epochal significance. The more enterprising and ambitious are moving to low-cost metropolitan areas and small towns, where the cycle begins anew.

This migration, in turn, has vastly diminished our quality of life by turning the commute into a process which can now easily absorb a sixth of our working days. Don’t believe me? In Washington, it’s now not uncommon to meet people who commute to town every day from Fredericksburg. But up until a few years ago, Fredericksburg was thought of as a suburb of Richmond, not Washington.

And in a few more years, I suspect that Richmond itself will become a D.C. suburb. If what has happened in Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco–even in Las Vegas–keeps spreading, then Americans will either have to stop having families and become a nation of DINKs, or radically reduce the standards of what we assumed was a comfortable middle-class situation commensurate with child-rearing.

Stop the ride, I want to get off.

The Hotline has a good tick-tock of the withdrawal and Kos–Kos!–of all people has a good analysis of the situation:

It seems to me that Miers wasn’t done in from a lack of conservative cred as the wingers want to believe. Bush was convinced she was like him and would’ve fought for her all the way through. She was done in from simple incompetence. Her responses to committee questions betrayed a complete lack of understanding of constitutional law. Her meager writings were incoherent. She was unable to articulate competence in meetings with senators.

Give Miers the same set of facts but with Judge Roberts’ obvious competence on legal issues, and she gets confirmed. She wasn’t done in because the crazies flipped. She was done in because she simply wasn’t competent to sit on the High Court and it was so painfully obvious.

I point this out not to gloat or throw my lot in with Kos (clearly, I’m already there), but to mark this post for the future, since I suspect three weeks from now we’ll be hearing left-wing charges about how the new nominee is just red-meat tribute being paid to the Right-Wing Extremists. Which just isn’t true.

This was always about competence.

In response to the amazing Star Jones eating-contest item from yesterday, Galley Friend B.W. sends in the following:

You know, I thought her PR guy did pretty well. He didn’t admit to lipo, and he didn’t ‘fess up to hubby Al weekending on Fire Island.

But eventually, a Star Jones sex tape will be released, and the prediction here is it kills the genre.

Fred Barnes has an outstanding piece of reporting on how the new Fed chairman was chosen; worth reading in full. Ben Bernanke seems, by all accounts, to a be a solid choice. But there are lots of telling, and unflattering, details about why the other candidates were rejected:

Kohn was appointed to the Fed board by President Bush at Greenspan’s urging. He had spent his entire career as a Fed economist and was the candidate of the Fed bureaucracy. Since the White House views the Fed staff as unfriendly to President Bush’s fiscal policy, that ruled out Kohn. He also is an environmentalist who rides a bike to work, thus not a Bush type of guy.

Bernanke’s chief rival was Martin Feldstein, 66, a Harvard professor and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Far more than Bernanke, he’s an economic star. . . .

But he had many critics, notably James A. Baker II, who was White House chief of staff in the early 1980s when Feldstein was CEA chairman. They clashed when Feldstein spoke negatively, on and off the record, about Reagan’s tax cuts. Baker thought Feldstein was disloyal and warned the current White House not to nominate him.

The other two candidates, Glenn Hubbard, 47, and Larry Lindsey, 51, worked for President Bush in his first term. Hubbard, now dean of Columbia Business School, was CEA chief. He favored the Bush policies of tax cuts and partial privatization of Social Security, but the president felt Hubbard sometimes talked down to him. . . .

Interesting, if not surprising.

Oberlin professor and comic genius Abe Socher has up this inspired bit of parody on how Leo Strauss guided the White Sox to their current glory. Not to be missed.

For the bitter-enders who now insist that pulling the Miers nomination is terrible, a bad precedent, etc., etc., etc., weren’t they just telling us all to “trust” the president’s judgment in nominating Miers, no matter the contrary evidence?

If Bush thinks it’s a good idea to withdraw Miers’s nomination, why, to those who have defended his judgment and wisdom ad nauseam, would that be any less good an idea than nominating her in the first place?

This president knows what he’s doing! Hasn’t he earned your trust?

For doing the right thing and withdrawing the Miers nomination.

Let this be a stern rebuke in the future to all those who insist that opposition is wrong because it has no chance of changing an outcome. Standing up for principle is always its own reward and besides which, one of the immutable laws of life is that Things Change.

Conservatives who opposed Miers–some at real personal and professional cost to themselves–have kept an unqualified person off the Supreme Court, defended the intellectual honesty of conservatism from rank partisan politics, and, ironically enough, protected President Bush from a mistake of his own making. If the president defers to quality for his next nomination, then memory of Miers will fade quickly and the president and his party will find themselves in much better political fortunes, to boot.

Bonus speculation: Does this suggest that Rove isn’t going to be indicted?