Monday, November 21, 2005

Meanwhile, Back At The Alito Ranch....

....The hard Left is still throwing things at the latest Associate Justice-designate and still having a devil of a time making anything stick:

Democratic senators from six red states returned home over the weekend for the Thanksgiving recess to confront television ads connecting critics of Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court with left-wing special interests. A simultaneous message intended ultimately to reach 10 million Americans made this same point.

The counterattack on Alito's behalf was triggered by the new TV advertisement of the liberal coalition opposing Alito's confirmation by the Senate. The ad claimed Alito, as a federal appellate judge, "even voted to approve the strip search of a 10-year-old girl." This distorts a case where a suspected drug dealer's daughter was searched, visibly not manually, by a female police officer in the presence of the child's mother. Alito's defenders make the legitimate argument that the assault against him ends up as [cue laugh track] a defense of drug dealers.
When the President rolled out Judge Alito as his replacement for Harriet Miers, everything did, indeed, return to normal - including the conspicuous absence of a White House/Republican defense of the nominee against the inevitably vicious, if also pathetically scattershot, left-wing assault. Yet this modest grassroots pushback shows how easy such a defense should be for elected Pachyderms to mount:

Red state Democratic senators, especially those up for re-election next year, face a dilemma in deciding how to vote on confirmation. The liberal pressure groups orchestrating the attack on Alito are central to the political health of the Democratic Party. But identification with them could be fatal in closely contested Senate races.
I would correct Bob Novak on one point - lib pressure groups are central to the financial health of the Democrat Party. Politically they're like bird flu. That's why "red" state Donks like Ben Nelson (NE), Kent Conrad (ND) and Robert Byrd (WV) are in such a quandry about wacko groups like People for the American Way, the Alliance for Justice, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the sponsors of the Wile E. Coyote-esque strip-search ad.

And yet their party leaders, all but held hostage by their neoBolshevik base, soldier mindlessly on. So while Minority Leader "Dirty Harry" Reid meets with AFJ chieftain Wade Henderson to "plot strategy against Alito," Joe "Hairplugs" Biden is firing the next salvo of slop:

The Senator Biden interview on FoxNews Sunday was quite notable. Not only did Senator Biden suggest the possibility of a filibuster of the Alito nomination has increased, but he also coonfirmed that the new line of attack on the Alito nomination will be that he is "extreme" because he questioned some of the Warren Court's reapportionment decisions. This opinion, Senator Biden said, was more problematic than Alito's stated opposition to quotas and Roe. [emphasis added]

Translation: Alito is against African-American sufferage. Or for African-American disenfranchisement. Another variation on the "He's right-wing, so he must be a racist!" card. And on that a filibuster is going to be based?

What strikes me about Biden's comments is that Affirmative Action and abortion aren't gaining much, or any, traction. If the libs can't mobilize a borking with their ostensibly two biggest truncheons, it doesn't say much for their chances of sustaining a filibuster or otherwise keeping Judge Alito off of Olympus.

I've been saying that borking is a lot tougher to pull off these days than it used to be. With each passing day the Left is finding that out more and more firsthand.

They've got seven weeks until Judge Alito's hearings start. Is that enough time to bleed his nomination to death from a thousand little cuts? Or will the conservative grassroots keep up the battle that the White House and Senate 'Pubbies refuse to fight?

When Justice Alito takes his place on the SCOTUS, one thing's for sure - he won't owe much of it to George W. Bush or his party's establishment.