George Will Has Gone Off the Reservation

Will has seemed to have a few misgivings about the President from time to time in the past, but his column today features the strongest anti-Bush statement I've seen so far (and he gives us a number to choose from): "The president's 'argument' for [Harriet Miers] amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons." Read the column yourself if you want his reasons.

This follows a Monday-night statement from Richard Viguerie, one of the original gurus of the grass-roots conservative movement. He sent a message to his extensive e-mail list of conservative operatives entitled, "Conservatives Feel Betrayed: 'President Bush Blinks on Supreme Court Nominees.'" He's mad at Bush, but he's apparently got no love lost on the Republican Congress, either. Viguerie's press release has a list of things conservatives don't like, but here are just a couple:

"President Bush has presided over the largest growth in government since Lyndon Johnson, and now he appears willing to lose all credibility with conservative voters by failing to fulfill his campaign vow to nominate an openly Scalia- or Thomas-like justice," Viguerie concluded.

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Conservatives will now begin to seriously consider why they should continue to give their support--money, labor, and votes--to Republican politicians who take their conservative base for granted by continually lying to them.

Yes, that's exactly the threat it sounds like, and Viguerie has the organization to pull it off. The Supreme Court has always been the big hope of the conservative movement, so we'll see if there's anything short of replacing Miers's name with a real fire-breather that Bush can do to pacify them. As the President's poll numbers have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, there has always been the assumption that they could only go down so far because he had an unshakable base. This is the sound of that base shaking.