The Party of Joe McCarthy

Can anyone now doubt that the hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee have become a complete and total farce?

Anyone who wanted to discover Sam Alito's views on the Constitution, his judiciary philosophy, or an honest review of the cases he decided while an appelate judge, will have to look elsewhere.

The Democrats don't care what he thinks about the Constitution. They just want to know how he will vote on any case involving abortion.

And since by now it is clear that they believe that he will vote to overturn Roe, or at least parts of it, they are so determined to prevent his assention to the Supreme Court that any tactic, no matter how dirty, will do.

Monday and Tuesday I thought that the hearings would be pretty much the same as the hearings for John Roberts; entirely without substance. The Democrats misrepresented his case history, and gave speeches instead of asking questions. Ok, so be it, I figured.

But after Wednesday it has become more clear than ever that the Democrats are the party of Joe McCarthy.

It was not enough for them to lie about his record as a judge

It was not enough for them to give endless speeches during their "question time", demonstrating that they didn't really care what Alito had to say.

And it wasn't enough that they make mountains out of molehills because they have absolutely nothing "on" Judge Alito.

But now they have stooped to a new low.

The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have decided that Judge Sam Alito...is a racist.

If they want engage in sillyness about how judges are supposed to "look out for the little guy", and "expand civil rights", yeah fine. We can all roll our eyes at their utter lack of understanding and move on.

But this is absolutely too much.

The Party of Compassion No More

As everyone knows, the situation got so bad that Mrs Alito left the committee room in tears to compose herself.

Oh yes, the great party of compassion, which lectures us endlessly about how they are oh so concerned with women and minorities, has devolved so far into a band of bullies by slandering her husband that she became emotional.

Hope you're happy, you bunch of pathetic creeps.

But of course none of this surprises, for this is the same party that believes that racial attacks on black Republicans is just fine.

And Mrs Alito shouldn't expect any sympathy from the feminists either, if this letter is any indication.

The Slander

Everyone with half a brain knows that his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton was because the cowards who ran the univesity had kicked ROTC off of campus. Alito was in ROTC, and like many decent people wanted to see it brought back.

That another member of CAP, H.W. Crocker III, wrote some controversial stuff that is controversial is not material.

For what it's worth, here's the quote that has caused so much fuss, and just to be sure, I checked both Washington papers, the Times and the Post, and it's the same in each:

"People nowadays just don't seem to know their place," author H.W. Crocker III wrote in a 1983 issue of the magazine. "Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."

A bit much, and a bit intemperate, but not racist. The first sentence is disturbing, to be sure. But I think that liberals are just upset because someone said that all of their "affirmative action" and "diversity" programs are simply quotas by other names.

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

The Democrats have their new slander

"Are you now or have you ever been a racist?"

All of this is especially rich coming from Senator Ted Kennedy, oh he of the answered questions of Chapaquiddick.

Worse, to back up his slander, Kennedy decided to go on a fishing expedition, demanding to see some documents of William Rusher (one time publisher of National Review) that are stored at the National Archives.

It was an illegitimate request because 1) the group in question cannot by any reasonable person be called extreme or "out of the mainstream". It was not a white supremicist group or anything similar, and 2) because Kennedy didn't know exactly what he was looking for. He just wanted to see if he could dig up some dirt.

Guilt by Association

The Democrats are engaged in the worst sort of slander; Guilt by Association.

Let's go through all of your memberships, Senator Kennedy, and see what we can find. Let's go through all of the magazines they published, or that you have ever subscribed to. For that matter, let's go through your family history.

From yesterday's Washington Times:

The eight-term senator belonged to an all-male social club -- the Owl -- at Harvard University. The Owl refused to admit women until it was forced to do so during the 1980s, according to records kept by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.

A Kennedy spokeswoman said it was an entirely different matter.

"No one can question Senator Kennedy's commitment to equality, justice and civil rights," said Laura Capps. "What he was part of was a social club, not a radical group pushing a radical agenda."

Oh I see. We can't question Kennedy because you say so. And of course he's not a radical.

Unfortunately for the good Senator, the Owl was kicked off campus in 1984 for it's refusal to admit women. And he's still a member, according to reasearch done by the Washington Times. Oops.

And as Mark Levin pointed out earlier this week,

Ted Kennedy’s father was sympathetic to Adolf Hitler while he served as Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain. Joseph Kennedy opened back-channels to the Third Reich. He was openly anti-Semitic. FDR had to recall him from his post. Now, what does that say about Ted Kennedy? Nothing — unless, of course, we adopt the smear by association tactics used against Alito.

Exactly.

Sad that it has to be spelled out; just because someone somewhere in an organization you belong(ed) to says something controversial does not mean that everyone who has ever belonged to that group subscribes to that same view.

A Bit of History

This is all not "politics as usual" as some will no doubt tell us. And no, the Republicans do not do the same thing to Democrat nominees.

Both of Clinton's appointees were confirmed by overwhelming margins: Ruth Bader Ginsberg 96-3 in 1993, and Stephen Breyer 87-9 in 1994. Yet half of the Democrats couldn't even vote to confirm John Roberts, the vote being 65-33.

Ginsberg was an attorny for the ACLU, hardly a "mainstream" organization. I don't have time this morning to go through her history, but to say that they were controversial would be to understate things. See here and here for details.

Yet Ginsberg and Breyer were eminently qualified for the supreme court, as a review of their careers show. President Clinton did win election, and as such deserved to have qualified nominees approved.

The Media

And notice how the two Washington DC papers covered it all

Wasington Times(quoted above) got their headline right today. Spashed across their front page:

"Alito accused of racism"

The Washington Post, meanwhile, couldn't see fit to call a spade a spade.

Alito Leaves Door Open to Reversing 'Roe'
Membership In Controversial Group Surfaces As an Issue

Now, that doesn't make it so bad, you see? And, just like they did with the blogger Bill Roggio, the Post just loves to put two separate issues into one story to give you the false idea that they are linked.

So, you see, he must be a racist and a sexist. Why, he opposes - gasp - a womans right to choose!

Which is what all this is about.

Update

Ted Kennedy says he's going to quit the Owl Club "as fast as I can"

The club does not allow female members, something it apparently took the good senator five decades to figure out.

As Jonah Goldberg said, that's HIGH-FRICK'N-LARIOUS

A Nuclear Iran

The latest ranting from Iran's dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, indicates two things:

(1) Iran is serious about building nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

(2) A nuclear Iran is serious about using nuclear weapons on Israel and other "infidel" nations and peoples.

You would think that such a foreign policy openly based on the principle of mass murder would generate bad press. But Jonah Goldberg recently noted in a recent column titled Unlikely Firebrand that Time magazine's coverage of Ahmadinejad was profoundly unserious.

....let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney, or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media. (Time has referred to both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Joe Lieberman as "unlikely firebrands"as well. To date neither has proposed genocide.)

But the problem, as Kennedy learned, is that evil men and dangerous forces don't take a timeout until we're ready to pay attention. And that's where Iran comes in. Seriously challenging Iran just strikes a lot of people as too much to fit on the American plate right now, so we prefer to call Ahmadinejad an "unlikely firebrand" instead of a murderous fanatic.

But whatever we call him, it won't change the fact that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and that Ahmadinejad is a particularly kooky religious fanatic (possibly a member of the Hojjatieh, which seeks to foment global chaos in order to hasten the arrival of the messianic 12th imam).

In response to Ahmadinejad's comments, the world has responded with only slightly more outrage than it would if he'd called for trade barriers on pistachios. It's time to wake up.

And James Robbins warns of what the world will look like if Iran does succeed in obtaining nuclear weapons.

Scenario One, very familiar to U.S. war planners. Tehran closes off the Straits of Hormuz and subjects the world to energy blackmail, an “access denial” strategy. Currently the Coalition would respond by sending a flotilla to force an entry, probably accompanied by a punitive air campaign against every available worthwhile target in Iran. At present the regime would have no effective way to respond to that. But if they had nuclear weapons, particularly with long-range missiles or other delivery systems, our war planning would be immensely complicated. How close would we risk sending a Carrier Battle Group? How punitive would we pursue an air campaign, knowing that when we bomb Tehran the Iranians might have the capability to strike back, perhaps against domestic targets using terrorist surrogates? Can we count on our allies if Iranian missiles can reach Europe — they cannot now, but if they have nukes, how can we stop Iran from developing longer-range weapons?

There would be some negative consequences resulting from a preemptive toppling of Iran's dictatorship, just as there would have been negative consequences resulting from enforcing against Hitler's Germany the treaties ending World War One. But the consequences of doing nothing in the case of Nazi Germany after the invasion of the Rhineland were far worse than preemptive attack. Similarly with Iran, doing nothing is probably the worst of all the available alternatives. Preemptive war should not be ruled out.