There is something to be said for consistency.  In a democracy such as ours that now has term limits; we have problems of keeping track of measures that guarantee or at least help keep in place continuity of government.  This is quite different where arbitrary leadership is not leadership but where government drives people in the direction the dictator, oligarch or theologian wants people to go.  This Republic will endure.  The Executive, the Legislative and Judicial branches of government are well established but they have been crippled by a lack of consistency.  The rules change with each shift in the country from one philosophy to another because there is freedom to do so. We have had Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Whigs and the Greenback Party and many others that never made it to the top two classifications.  They are still out there – even Monarchists who have not gotten used to the idea of citizens ruling their own country. It would be so much easier to have a dictator such as Mubarak in Egypt who has kept his job because he used every undemocratic measure to clear the field of opposition.

In the grand attempt to build a new, democratic nation in Iraq, according to Tom Friedman in the NY Times this morning, an Iraqi delegation of jurists and journalists came to study the U.S. model.  They found it confusing, contradictory and they had to leave because they could not reconcile America’s design for Iraq in U.S. practices. At the end of his column, Tom Friedman said the above story was a hoax and although we might wish it were true, unfortunately there are not that many enlightened democrats in Iraq.

It is frightening to see how far we have gone from the belief that there is a wall between Church and State.  We forget the flight from religious strictures that led to the settlement of Europeans in a strange “savage” land.  These settlers became invaders and could not find believers in Jesus or the Bible among the teeming tribes of native peoples so they systematically repressed and excluded them from becoming Americans.  They were driven out and almost exterminated by those who proclaimed “Liberty throughout the Land”.  These Europeans enslaved Africans who in a compromise were allowed to be 3/5ths of a person for purposes of white representation in those Republican Institutions.

The litmus test for Harriet Miers should be her competency not the consistency in being the evangelical Christian her boss is.  President Bush is at least consistent and, I believe, America is waking up to the fact that his qualifications are not consistent with the job he was elected to do. He does not represent all of the American people and has worked to bend those who are different to the shape he understands – they, along with Harriet Miers, must be conservative, Christian and willing to buy a bridge over troubled waters.