Sam Alito and Joe McCarthy

WARNING - POLITICAL CONTENT! I DON'T USUALLY TALK POLITICS - YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED WITH MY SPOUTINGS - BUT....

This post isn't really about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. My general position is that the President gets to choose his judicial appointments and - barring anything truly bizarre - the Senate ought to confirm them. It's always been that way, even when Clinton was president and nominated Ruth Bader Ginsberg (a person odious to most Republicans I know).

So, Sam's OK with me.

But this whole confirmation process isn't:

Ginsberg's process - from nomination to swearing-in - took only 5 days. The Roberts and Alito processes have taken months.

When we got to it, the first day of hearings was spent with politicians posturing, making speeches AT (Democrats) or FOR (Republicans) the nominee instead of asking for information FROM him.

That Sen. Edward Kennedy would question Alito's ethics and integrity is appalling. Kennedy, after all, is the only murderer in the Senate, and that gruesome deed happened on the way to an extra-marital tryst. Does he have the right to ask? Sure, he's a Senator. But doesn't it seem incongruous?

Sen. Chuck Schumer accused Alito of being evasive, when his party complimented Ruth Bader-Ginsberg for the same evasiveness. She said, "I do not want to give here any sense, I do not want to say one word of what I said would be my rule - no hints, no previews... on how I would answer that question. To do so would be to act injudiciously." Of Ginsburg, Sen. Joseph Biden said, "A judge has a right to choose what you answer and do not answer, and in fact should not answer about a question that may come before the court...."

(By the way, the Republican who asked her that question let her off the hook with a knowing smile and a laugh.)

Yesterday, Biden picked on Alito's membership in a college club because (in his opinion) the club was sexist. What can I say about THIS twit? First, the club included women. Second, the position of the club FAVORED sex-BLIND admissions, with no more weight being given to men than women, and opposed quotas and set-asides. Third, Kennedy himself belonged to an all-male club whose primary qualifications were wealth and "breeding" (and I'm guessing there were no poor, black women in the Newport 400!). Fourth, on the Today show this morning (as I ate my raisin bran) Biden explained why his questioning was appropriate: "Katie, wouldn't it be right for me to ask, 'Are you a member of the Nazi Party?' " Come on! NAZIS??? NOW IT'S COMPARABLE TO NAZIS???????? The insinuation is slimey.

Slimey.

When Joseph McCarthy was interrogating people in the 1950s in an effort to dig out communists, he once was asked the question "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" McCarthy's concerns were valid; spies gave our atomic and nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and declassified documents from Moscow show that the KGB controlled the American Communist Party and had many agents in the State Department. McCarthy's tactics, however, were abusive and what I like to ironically call "unAmerican".

I feel the same way when I see preening politicians pick on a good man, to the extent that his wife has to leave the room in tears. Their aims may be good, honorable, even patriotic; I don't know. But of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I must ask "Have you no sense of decency?"


For more about "McCarthyism" (the original kind, not what we've seen this week), look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism . And for those of you who care, I am keeping my flossing resolution. :-)<