The lovably irascibleBeldar, the Texas trial lawyer who is one of the two people on earth hotly defending the Miers nomination (the other being our buddy Hugh Hewitt), has posted a convenient link to articles written by Harriet Miers during one of her stints as a bar association honcho. He did this in part to address a charge I made on Hugh’s show that Miers shouldn’t be taken seriously because over the past 30 years of hot dispute on matters of constitutional law she hadn’t published so much as an op-ed on a single topic of moment. Thank you, Beldar. But you shouldn’t have. I mean, for Miers’s sake, you really shouldn’t have.

Miers’s articles here are like all “Letters from the President” in all official publications — cheery and happy-talky and utterly inane. They offer no reassurance that there is anything other than a perfectly functional but utterly ordinary intellect at work here.

Let me offer you an analogy. I was a talented high-school and college actor. I even considered trying it as a career at one time. As an adult, I’ve been in community theater productions (favorably reviewed in the Virginia local weekly supplement of the Washington Post, yet!) and spent a year or so performing improv comedy in New York. I’m a more than decent semi-pro. But if you took me today and gave me a leading role in the Royal Shakespeare Company where I would have to stand toe to toe with, say, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Spacey, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and others, I would be hopelessly out of my depth. I would be able to give some kind of performance. But it would be a lousy performance, a nearly unwatchable performance.

Would that be because I hadn’t acted at their level for a few decades? Would it be because I don’t really have commensurate talent? Who knows? Who cares? I would stink. And based on the words she herself has written — the clearest independent evidence we have of her capacity to reason and think and argue — as a Supreme Court justice, Harriet Miers would be about as good.