The problem is that Mr. Vinciguerra is artfully ambiguous and doesn’t quite come clean with his readers. At first blush, any of three radically different possibilities might be in play:

1. Mr. Vinciguerra may conceivably be offering his readers a genuine choice: “Read the evidence, and then decide for yourself, folks, who’s right in this fascinating debate.”

2. Or he may have read the evidence himself, been pleasantly surprised at what the high-schoolers were studying, and is therefore asking his readers: “Can you believe that the snobs at the U. of California would really exclude kids for studying something that makes such good sense as these excerpts exhibit?”

3. Or he may be asking what I think (and fear) he really is saying: “Can you believe these Christians are coming to a court trial with such wacky ideas and actually hoping a 21st-century judge will uphold them?”

Author Thomas Vinciguerra pairs a brief comment with a quotation from a Bob Jones University Press textbook:

Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as “an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin.”

The sin in this case was greed – greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. … The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin’s devastating consequences – for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).

Shocking stuff, that. Imagine: thinking sin might play a role in human affairs, instead of just politics and economics. To the flames!

Even the abstract laws of energy and matter, the authors write, reflect the hand of God.

You are about to embark on an adventure. The study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God’s creation – so orderly that it can be comprehended in terms of relatively simple principles (mathematical formulas). … Physics is important because through it mankind learns how creation actually works. It satisfies our God-given curiosity about nature. Seeing that God does “great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number” (Job 5:9), men have dedicated their lives to unraveling the rich mysteries of creation.

Again, what horrors! The “study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God’s creation”–where would Western Civilization be had, say, Isaac Newton thought such things? Someone please re-educate the poor dupes.

Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early 90’s, while she was president of the Texas bar association, Miers wrote a column called “President’s Opinion” for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn’t even rise to the level of pedestrian.

Of course, we have to make allowances for the fact that the first job of any association president is to not offend her members. Still, nothing excuses sentences like this:

“More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems.”

Or this: “We must end collective acceptance of inappropriate conduct and increase education in professionalism.”

Or this: “When consensus of diverse leadership can be achieved on issues of importance, the greatest impact can be achieved.”

Or passages like this: “An organization must also implement programs to fulfill strategies established through its goals and mission. Methods for evaluation of these strategies are a necessity. With the framework of mission, goals, strategies, programs, and methods for evaluation in place, a meaningful budgeting process can begin.”

Or, finally, this: “We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective.

Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support.”

I don’t know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers’s prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided.

It’s not that Miers didn’t attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.

Or as she puts it, “There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law.” And yet, “Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority.”

Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers’s columns provide no evidence of that.

The Miers nomination has reopened the rift between conservatives and establishment Republicans. The conservative movement was founded upon the supposition that ideas have consequences. Conservatives have founded so many think tanks, magazines and organizations, like the Federalist Society, because they believe that you have to win arguments to win political power. They dream of Supreme Court justices capable of writing brilliant opinions that will reshape the battle of ideas.

Republicans, who these days are as likely to be members of the corporate establishment as the evangelical establishment, are more suspicious of intellectuals and ideas, and more likely to believe that politics is about deal-making, loyalty and power. You know you are in
establishment Republican circles when the conversation is bland but unifying. You know you are in conservative circles when it is interesting but divisive. Conservatives err by becoming irresponsible. Republicans tend to be blown about haplessly by forces they cannot understand.

For the first years of his presidency, George Bush healed the division between Republicans and conservatives by pursuing big conservative goals with ruthless Republican discipline. But Harriet Miers has shown no loyalty to conservative institutions like the Federalist Society.
Her loyalty has been to the person of the president, and her mental style seems to be Republicanism on stilts.

So conservatives are caught between loyalty to their ideas and loyalty to the president they admire. Most of them have come out against Miers — quietly or loudly. Establishment Republicans are displaying their natural loyalty to leadership. And Miers is caught in the vise between these two forces, a smart and good woman who has been put in a position where she cannot succeed.

My dad directs a faculty-juried contest of academic papers submitted by undergraduates. Usually he’ll have some students in his seminars evaluate the papers. Then he asks them, “which paper did you like the best?”; they often pick the eventual winner. When he asks them, “which paper do you think will win the contest?” they often pick another, poorly-written paper, a paper that uses the same kind of generalities and empty phrases we see above.

My point is that a lot of people think that kind of writing, because it’s incomprehensible, must be brilliant. I wonder if that’s partly why Bush put Miers on the top of his Supreme Court list.

The marquee columnists for The New York Times’ Op-Ed page – including Thomas L. Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich – generate lots of interest and discussion online. Now, the paper is hoping they’ll also generate something else: cash.

Beginning Monday, the Times will begin charging $49.95 a year to people who don’t get the paper delivered at home for access to those writers as well as other columnists for the Times’ business, metro and sports sections.

The new service called TimesSelect will also include access to the Times’ archives, early looks at some sections of the paper and online tools for tracking and storing articles from the Times Web site. The Times will still maintain a separate premium service for its crossword puzzles.

I understand that the New York Times needs to make money, but I doubt this is the best way to do it in the long run. The trend on the web has been toward free access to information, with advertising providing revenue. I predict that if the Times keeps this up, readers will find other, freely available columnists and bloggers, and the NYT columnists will be marginalized.

After all, supply will match demand, and the NYT columnists aren’t necessary. Even if they were: as the saying goes, graveyards are filled with necessary people.