Heart rending moments in the Alito hearings
Gawd. Please.
Give me a break.
If she doesn't want to hear her husband referred to (by one of his supporters, no less) as a "closet bigot," then she might consider advising said husband to answer the fucking question about what he was thinking when he joined CAP and bragged about it when he applied for a job in the Reagan Justice dept. The "I don't recall" is ridiculous. As Dahlia Lithwick writes, mentioning CAP on his job application was all about code words -- it showed he was the very Angry White Male who helped propel Reagan into office, without actually saying as much. If he simply said, "I really wanted that job, Senator, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now. Not so much," most people would be pretty well appeased. 1985 was, after all, a weird year.
Whether or not he really was such an Angry White Male is not the point. The point is that Alito has been in denial mode this entire week. He denies he has any judicial viewpoint regarding women's rights, Executive power, or the rights of defendants, when, in fact, he has a long history on the bench of exhibiting extreme views on all three.
Truth is, the hearings are a sham. Roberts could get past these questions because he had no paper trail as a judge. Alito doesn't have that luxury. Reid & Co. should have said, upfront, "Hearings be damned; we'll only be stonewalled and head faked. We're filibustering Princetonian Sam, not because he isn't luvable as all get out and a working class hero (sorry, stupid firewall, but in this case consider yourself lucky), but because this is an obvious attempt by the Cheney administration to stack the court with justices who share its capacious view of Executive power and its pinched view of individual rights."
"There's no reason why I would make such a conscious decision," Judge Alito replied. "I had nothing whatsoever to gain by participating in this case, and nobody has suggested that I did."
When Mr. Graham asked him in the same fashion, "Are you really a closet bigot?" - because of his membership in a Princeton alumni group that opposed the university's affirmative action program - Judge Alito said he was "not any kind of bigot," to which Mr. Graham agreed.
At that point, Mrs. Alito began to sniffle audibly. She hurried to a corner of the hearing room, then went into an anteroom, where she sobbed for a few minutes. She later returned to the hearing room.
Give me a break.
If she doesn't want to hear her husband referred to (by one of his supporters, no less) as a "closet bigot," then she might consider advising said husband to answer the fucking question about what he was thinking when he joined CAP and bragged about it when he applied for a job in the Reagan Justice dept. The "I don't recall" is ridiculous. As Dahlia Lithwick writes, mentioning CAP on his job application was all about code words -- it showed he was the very Angry White Male who helped propel Reagan into office, without actually saying as much. If he simply said, "I really wanted that job, Senator, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now. Not so much," most people would be pretty well appeased. 1985 was, after all, a weird year.
Whether or not he really was such an Angry White Male is not the point. The point is that Alito has been in denial mode this entire week. He denies he has any judicial viewpoint regarding women's rights, Executive power, or the rights of defendants, when, in fact, he has a long history on the bench of exhibiting extreme views on all three.
Truth is, the hearings are a sham. Roberts could get past these questions because he had no paper trail as a judge. Alito doesn't have that luxury. Reid & Co. should have said, upfront, "Hearings be damned; we'll only be stonewalled and head faked. We're filibustering Princetonian Sam, not because he isn't luvable as all get out and a working class hero (sorry, stupid firewall, but in this case consider yourself lucky), but because this is an obvious attempt by the Cheney administration to stack the court with justices who share its capacious view of Executive power and its pinched view of individual rights."
posted by John at 10:47 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home