On Fox News' "Special Report with Brit Hume" Friday, NPR reporter/pundit Juan Williams weighed in on today's announcement by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that she would be retiring.

When asked by host Jim Angle if the deal by the "Gang of 14" on avoiding the nuclear option and allowing William Pryor, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown onto the appellate bench set boundaries as to what an acceptable Supreme Court nominee would look like, Williams flatly rejected it.

If you had those three -- if you had three like that, they would be filibustered. Period.

Just last month, Williams pompously denied a claim by The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes that if Clarence Thomas were nominated to day that he would be filibustered.

Neither Pryor, Owen or Brown is out of the judicial mainstream -- and neither is Justice Thomas. If Williams' analysis of the Democrat side of the Gang of 14's deal is accurate, then the deal was merely hudna. If Williams' belief that senators Lindsey Graham, Mike DeWine and John Warner won't agree to go nuclear if Democrats attempt to filibuster a mainstream conservative is correct, then the battle over the Supreme Court nominee is going to look like a second-grade schoolyard fight compared to the thermonuclear fallout that will come down on those three from the GOP base.

For the record, unless President Bush is absolutely positive that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is far more conservative than many legal watchers believe him to be, the only justices he is suitable to replace are John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I'm willing to trade a liberal for a moderate, but not a moderate for a moderate or a conservative for a moderate.