Monday was the day of the great conservative mutiny against George W. Bush. It is hard to overstate the shock that the nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt the President's supporters, both in Washington and through the country.

John Podhoretz, for example, is the author of a strongly positive 2004 book about the Bush presidency, Bush Country. "The problem with the Miers nomination is that there are a dozen scholarly judges and thinkers, including women, who were unambiguously more qualified for the position," he wrote on National Review Online yesterday. "Bush passed them over to throw a lifetime bone to his friend and deputy."

I come to this event with special pain. I believe I was the first journalist to predict the possibility of a Miers appointment, back in July of this year. My thought at that time was that if the President ran into opposition in the Senate to a more conservative nominee, he might fall back on his loyal counsellor and friend--who had the merits of being from Texas, being a woman and having no published record of her legal philosophy.

But then the President's first Supreme Court pick, the superbly qualified John Roberts, sailed right through the Senate. The Republican majority held together, and even many Democrats declined to wage war against a distinguished jurist and appealing personality solely on grounds of ideology. That was an invitation for the President to accept Admiral Hyman Rickover's challenge to his young officers: "Why not the best?"

An excellent Supreme Court choice was all the more necessary to the President because his conservative political base has rapidly eroded since the November election. Conservatives are unhappy about his immigration amnesty proposals. They are disturbed by the administration's spending--by the huge looming costs of his new prescription drug benefit--and by the consequent deficits that threaten his tax cut, the great domestic-policy achievement of his presidency.

Katrina also cut into the President's standing with his supporters, as did the post-Katrina spending binge. But until Monday, as from the beginning, conservatives held faithful because of their hopes that this president would at last turn around the Supreme Court.

Who knows? Those hopes may yet come true. But American conservatives have spent a quarter-century preparing and fielding a cohort of eminently qualified jurists of conservative mind who have proven themselves in the nation's high courts. Never before has there been so much talent to choose from. Not in 20 years has there been so clear an opportunity for a conservative president to change the direction of the courts. President Bush has instead asked conservatives to take an unknown nominee on faith. And these days that faith is running rather low.

Readers of my column may have seen a Sept. 17 editor's note on the subject of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada (CAIR-Canada). This note settled a libel action CAIR-Canada and Sheema Khan initiated last year against this newspaper and against me. The action involved two columns I wrote for the Post, one on Oct. 1, 2004, and another on Nov. 23, 2004.

The editor's note acknowledged that CAIR-Canada does not itself as an organization advocate or promote terrorism. I had thought my original columns were more than clear on that point, but I had no hesitation in making the acknowledgement.

It should also be said that the editor's note does not constitute an apology or retraction. I continue to stand by the columns and the Sept. 17 editor's note, and they will remain posted on my Web site, www.davidfrum.com, in the archive for 2004. My supreme interest through the whole course of this litigation has been to defend and maintain the right of a free press to report truthful information about advocacy organizations such as CAIR and CAIR Canada. That interest has now been vindicated.

There are two footnotes to this matter that I'd wish to add to the public record.

In the Oct. 1 column, I took issue with the column written by Sheema Khan, chair of CAIR-Canada, that contained an inflammatory misquotation from the book I co-wrote with Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Khan says that the error was not her own. She says she reprinted the misquotation from another source. I am satisfied with Khan's explanation of the error.

The second footnote concerns CAIR-Canada's description of its relationship with American CAIR as "close but distinct." In my Nov. 23 column, I wrote that "it is not clear what this means." That meaning is a little clearer today.

During a trademark legal proceeding in 2003, Sheema Khan swore an affidavit in which she declared that CAIR-Canada was the Canadian chapter of CAIR and originated in the following manner: "I formed the Ottawa chapter of CAIR UNITED STATES and became Director. We were known as CAIR OTTAWA and in June 2000, we filed a non-profit incorporation with Industry Canada." The affidavit goes on to state that under the terms of a trademark licence "CAIR United States has direct control over the character and quality of all activities" of her group including the use of its trademark and trade name.

I will shortly be posting copies of the affidavit to the davidfrum.com site, to make this new information available to all who wish to read it.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.