Out of My Mind

A perfect example of utter and complete crap journalism. So crappy, it isn't even journalism. Rather, it's a complete lie, completely dishonest. From the Wall Street Journal (without a link 'cause I have no clue where/how it's archived and don't care to look):

THE EVENING WRAP
By MARK GONGLOFF

Alito Breezing Through

January 12, 2006 5:52 p.m.

In his Senate confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito may have seemed awkward compared to the butter-smooth Chief Justice John Roberts, but the end result will likely be the same: Judge Alito appears to be on a glide path to the high court.

Judge Alito kicked off his four-day ordeal with a fumbled "joke" involving I-95 and Amtrak, which was greeted by nothing more than the chirping of crickets. Later, his wife at one point left the hearing room in tears. But the rest of the process was pretty much a cakewalk for the conservative judge picked by President Bush to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Given her role as a swing vote in tight Supreme Court decisions, the stakes were high for Democrats. They vowed to grill him relentlessly, and there was even talk of a filibuster. Though Judge Alito's odds of confirmation were always pretty good, Democrats had a decent shot at tripping him up. Recent opinion polls showed that most Americans were uncertain about him -- meaning they might have been willing to hear a case against him. Judge Alito's opinions favoring broad government powers seemed particularly vulnerable to attack, at a time when the nation was roiled by warrantless eavesdropping and other tests of the limits of presidential power. In the 1980s, he had spoken against Roe v. Wade and in favor of Robert Bork, not exactly majority positions in today's America.

But in his confirmation hearings, many Democrats spent more energy exercising their own vocal cords than exploring weaknesses in his testimony. And his disciplined answers were nothing to spook either liberals or conservatives: he vowed to respect Supreme Court precedent and to consider abortion cases with an open mind -- though he also declined to say Roe was "settled law." He said no president is above the law, but declined to declare specific presidential actions illegal. Today, he praised Justice O'Connor and defended the right of Americans to set the terms of their own deaths through living wills. By the time it was over, whatever hope the Democrats had of maintaining a filibuster had vaporized.

The apparent success of Judge Alito's nomination would certainly be good news for President Bush. For one thing, it brings closer the day when he can look back on last year's disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers and laugh. For another, it repesents a political win at a time when he desperately needs one.

Yeah, he breezes through with absolutely complete lies and not a scintila of honest testimony.

As someone or other said recently, instead of the Judiciary Committee show, one can look at Alito's actual record. As being noted, the two can't actually be reconciled. But of course, we're to believe what we're told not what we see. See this:

Alito's hearing, by contrast, is serving to eclipse his astonishing fifteen years as a federal appellate judge; to wipe from memory a track record hundreds of cases long. At Wednesday's hearings, Democrats zeroed in on a handful of issues--CAP, Roe, Alito's theory of executive power, his participation in a Vanguard Mutual Fund case despite investments--which Alito had long been prepared to deflect with well-rehearsed technocratic answers and evasion.

Almost absent from the witness stand was the Alito of the last fifteen years--who, as the Yale Law School's Alito Project report notes, "has sought to move the law to acheive the broad philosophical purposes" articulated in that now-notorious 1985 Justice Department memo. At day's close Democrats requested a third round of questioning. Their case now depends, in essence, on calling that Alito as a witness against the genial equivocator on stage this week.

(The rest is here.)

(Of course, his confirmation is assured but the point is to keep in mind how completely unfit he is to be an associate justice of the S.C. and of course not to be surprised by how he acts on the bench: as a true radical anti-democrat.)