60s Sit-Coms2Life

You live long enough, certain pop-culture references to the follies of Bush make sense. You post-Boomers, meanwhile, will just have to watch TVLand to keep up.

Bill Maher, for example, recently likened former FEMA director Michael Brown and SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers to "Goober and Aunt Bea," harkening the more distant but still appreciated reference by John DiIulio, the former head of Bush's effort to aid religious charities, to senior White House staff as "Mayberry Machiavellis."

James Wolcott's getting a similar drift, but he has another 60s sit-com in mind:

Harriet Miers is George Bush's Miss Jane Hathaway. Miss Hathaway, archeologists will recall, was Mr. Drysdale's prim, devoted secretary on the Beverly Hillbillies. When not bailing her boss out of jams, Miss Hathaway's hobby was birdwatching, which in those unenlightened days was considered the solitary pastime of harmless eccentrics. But infused with the infectious stylized foolery of Nancy Culp, Miss Hathaway was more than a spinsterish stick figure; a subversive imp amid all those load-bearing hillbillies and lacquered Beverly Hills matrons, Miss Hathaway was sitcom's first lesbian heroine.

Leaving aside Miss Jane's goofy if less subliminal crush on Jethro, Wolcott is more correct when he trots out what I also had surmised to be the underlying theory behind the Jumbo Shrimp's current high-dudgeon:

After listening to their rending of garments and gnawing of bark over the last week, it is clear that they were hoping Bush would pick a Federalist Society stalwart that they could use like a club with which to beat Democrats and feminist organizations into whimpering mush. They longed for a climactic showdown, the desire to overturn Roe v. Wade beats harder in their blood and means more to them than winning in Iraq, and instead Bush trots out one of his surrogate mommies, a loyalist of insignicant stature.

Again, it is as I had thought but was late in presenting: It isn't enough that Miers likely will give them everything they want in an evangelical rubber stamp, they also had to rub our noses in it -- all the way up to confirmation. Dubya deprived them that pleasure, and that is what triggers their sense of having been betrayed. And watching them recoil, as though they were tasting their bile for the first time, is a moment of unmitigated and primitive delight -- if however shortlived.