WP/Tina Brown: You've Come a Long Way, Ladies (Miers)

[kskiska]

(snip)

Nevertheless, there's a feminist- or pre-feminist lesson here. 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.

You can imagine the scene with painful vividness as the lamp burned late at her tidy desk on the 35th floor of the Republic National Bank tower in downtown Dallas, where she worked at the law firm of Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely. Another night without a date. Another night that would end with her key turning in the lock of a dark apartment, a bag of groceries in one hand, a briefcase bulging with documents in the other. Like Condi Rice, who sacrificed so much of her personal life to become a policy nun and ultimately the high priestess of the Temple of the Two Bushes, Miers had paid a price for her single-minded pursuit of career advancement. She had shattered every glass ceiling of the Texas bar, only to be waiting alone after hours for her old pal Judge Nathan L. Hecht to pad down the corridor from his office with a consoling Bible and the promise of being born again.

(snip)

The difference between Rice and Miers is more than just the 10-year age gap or the psychic distance between Stanford and Dallas. Condi operates with careful deference, but unlike Miers she is more than just the skilled expediter of Bushean business. Condi has always been a peer who was too savvy to behave like one. While Miers stayed in a guest trailer on her visits to Crawford, Rice stayed at the ranch and worked out on the exercise bike next to Bush.

(snip)

Happy Birthday, Lady T(hatcher) -- 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.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101202328.html

[Straight Shooter]

1. What a dreary picture of a workaholic career woman.

And I resent the hell out of it. Miers made her own decisions as to her priorities. If she didn't have a date, well, maybe it had something to do with her personally rather than her worklife. Maybe her standards were too high. Maybe they were too low, considering she finally settled on georgie as her ultimate dream date.

Sure goes to show bush's favoritism to Condi, though, putting Miers in a guest trailer. Although I bet that "trailer" is rather plush. Yikes, maybe it was Laura's decision to keep Miers away from the ranch and not allow her to "work out" with bush. Heh.