Remember the Gang of 14

It's becoming clear to me that the loud opposition on the right to the Miers nomination is mostly about the fight the conservatives have been waiting to fight for many, many years. Ever since the Bork fiasco and the Clarence Thomas/ Anita Hill soap opera, many rightward-leaning individuals have just been itching for the showdown over ideology, the fight that would restore some balance and sanity to court decisions. The main reason many conservatives supported Bush two times was the hope that the Supreme Court would get more Scalias and Thomases. After all, Ginsberg and Breyer were bitter pills to swallow during the God-awful Clinton years. For five long years the faithful of the political right waited. And waited.
And then it happened! The rapid-fire announcement of the O'Conner retirement followed by the death of the Chief Justice finally brought the opportunity to fix the Supreme Court. And when the nominees didn't have perfect conservative pedigrees the bitching began. Don't forget the Ann Coulters and others on the right were not high on Roberts, either. But remember that the President cannot be motivated so much by the ideological battle as the practical necessity to actually get confirmable Justices. So the fight that the right wanted was thwarted before it ever began by famous "gang of 14" and the Republicans who refused to enable the so-called "nuclear option," ever-fearful of not being able to use it themselves in the future. As if the Democrats would not invoke it themselves if it was in their own interest. C'mon, boys and girls, the Senate is no longer a Gentlemens club; Hardball is played there.
So the "nuclear option" is on the shelf. The Democrats have reserved the right to filibuster for essentially any reason they see fit. So what real chance would a Luttig or a Janice Rogers Brown stand in the Senate. None, of course.
So the fight cannot be now. The President knows this, so he made a choice calculated to to have a high chance of success. Look to McCain, Dewine, and the other wishy-washy Republicans if you don't really like this nominee, because its the only kind Bush could make after they stupidly scuttled the "nuclear", sorry Constitutional, option earlier this year.