[quote]
JustTheFacts wrote:
Will Vicious Dems pay for driving Alito’s wife to tears?
Perfect examples of why Fox and the Weekly Standard are not so fair and balanced.
Alito’s Wife Cries at Confirmation Hearing
The Associated Press
January 12, 2006
WASHINGTON – Martha-Ann Bomgardner left her husband’s confirmation hearings in tears, returning not long after. The episode elicited sympathy for her from senators of both parties _ and instant finger-pointing.
After sitting behind Samuel Alito for two days of intense questioning at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, she left the room during questioning of her husband by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
And Graham was trying to vouch for him.
Mimicking questions from Democrats, Graham asked Alito: “Are you really a closet bigot?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/12/AR2006011200124_pf.html
Professor X wrote:
Very good post.[/quote]
Yeah, provided you don’t think about it too hard.
Firstly, Cavuto is a talk show, not a news show – ergo, of course it’s going to be biased. An opinion is a bias. He gives editorials, and says, “This is my opinion.” It’s a pretty obvious distinction.
Secondly, let’s think about cause here for a moment. Do you really think that Lindsay Graham’s question is what caused Mrs. Alito to cry? Without the background “questioning” by Kennedy, Schumer et al on the whole retarded CAP issue, do you think Mrs. Alito would have cried at Graham’s question (which was Graham’s attempt to bring to the foreground the implications that Schumer, Kennedy et al were trying to get at in their soliloquoies/questions)?
To quote from Todd Zywicki on the CAP question:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.shtml#1137095315
[i]…There appear to be two possible explanations. [On the] One hand, it may be to simply ask Alito about the organizations to which he belonged and to ascertain his views today. Or, on the other hand, to attempt to smear Judge Alito by engaging in guilt by association and innuendo to suggest that he is racist, sexist, elitist, gay-basher, as suggested in the article in the Washington Times today (which I noted this morning).
In deciding which of these two competing explanations is more plausible, one would expect to see very different approaches to the questioning by Senator Kennedy. If the purpose was simply to establish whether Alito had a meaningful association with the organization and what his views are today, then it seems to me that the questions that were asked would focus on those points. If this was the purpose, I cannot see why there would be any need to go into great detail in expostulating the views of other individuals associated with the organization, such as reading inflammatory and retrograde articles written in the organization’s magazine. It seems to me that dragging out these long quotes would be utterly irrelevant to establishing the questions of Alito’s relationship to the group, why he joined it, and what his views are today.
If, by contrast, the primary purpose of the inquiry is to cast aspersions and to imply that Alito was (and perhaps is) a racist, sexist bigot, then all of the hoary details would not only be relevant, but would be prominently featured as statements buried in the “questions.”[/i]
I think anyone paying attention at the hearings knows along which lines the “questions” went.
