Will Bunch says,

Do you honestly believe that Harriet Miers -- with all her other qualifications exactly the same -- would have been nominated to the Supreme Court if she had been Jewish, or an atheist, or Muslim?

Well, no -- but as I keep saying, that's because Bush stupidly misjudged the people who tell him what to do and chose someone who's religiously correct, not ideologically correct.

Look -- Bush could have picked a gay junkie atheist and been subjected to less criticism from his base, if that gay junkie atheist were ideologically pure. The people in the base love Christopher Hitchens, even though he hates religion. They love the liberal-bashing Tammy Bruce, author of The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and other books, even though she is -- as WorldNetDaily puts it -- a "self-proclaimed homosexual." (And in the early days of the war, when he was unambiguously gung ho, they loved Andrew Sullivan.) To the extent that the Right has overcome some of its historical racism, it's because of admiration for ideological purists such as Clarence Thomas (Strom Thurmond voted for him even though he had a white wife) and Alan Keyes.

I still don't understand why Bush didn't understand that.

So I'll answer Will Bunch's question with a question:

Do you honestly believe that there would have been a firestorm of right-wing criticism if Bush had nominated a certain never-married woman in her forties who "make[s] out in public" and "live[s] on nothing but Chardonnay and cigarettes"? Isn't it obvious that he's getting more criticism on the right for nominating Harriet Miers than he would have if he'd nominated Ann Coulter?