Washington Post columnist Tina Brown today took the opportunity to mark the 80th birthday of Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, with a scathing attack on Harriet Miers.
In, "You've Come a Long Way, Ladies," Brown begins:
The healthiest aspect of the Harriet Miers nomination is that women haven't rallied to her cause. Ten years ago, there would have been a lot of reflexive solidarity about keeping the Sandra Day O'Connor spot on the Supreme Court from reverting to male type. But every female lawyer I've spoken with in the past week skips right past the sisterly support into a rant about Miers's meager qualifications or her abject obeisance to power. The good news is that for women, it seems, Miers's nomination is like the moment for blacks in Hollywood when it was suddenly okay to cast an African American actor as something other than a perfect hero. The Sidney Poitier phase is definitively over.
Brown adds in some condescending pity for the single, never-married Miers:
Miers's whole story can be read as a cautionary tale for women on the move. It's about the sacrifices she made, the muzzled nature of her striving. The bleakest detail of Miers's résumé is that her decision to accept Jesus Christ as her savior took place at the office.
But her overall view of Miers is one of fear and loathing, as she closes her column with a birthday wish for her fellow countrywoman Lady Margaret Thatcher:
Happy Birthday, Lady T -- and hail to you and all the women who've gone before! You won us the freedom to say that if opting for a Harriet Miers means we risk getting not just a sycophant but a stem-cell-banning, abortion-denying, Bible-thumping presidential sycophant, maybe we'd just as soon have a guy.
