Discourse.net

Harriet Myers is the Supreme Court nominee of whom it cannot be said that it is conceivable that George W. Bush could ever choose a better nominee?

I believe that the argument is that she is the "best" conceivable nominee when "best" is defined as "least likely to act like Justice Thomas". The argument that In that sense she might be "better" than any other person Bush would have been willing to nominate is at least plausible, and may be come persuasive once we know more about her. Or not.

Plus, Brad, one has to wonder if Bush has a very special type of free will indeed. Because Bush is incapable of learning or of seeing error, the moment he makes a decision, all possible alternatives are constrained to the set of alternatives even worse than the one he made. Thus, he always "could have done otherwise," for any given Bush-action B, but the value Bv will always be worse than any possible alternative done by someone non-Bush, N. I.e. Nv > Bv > B2v for all values of N and B.