NYT's Frank Rich hits Dems for 'ineptitude' in Alito hearings
RAW STORYPublished: January 21, 2006
By setting their hopes on a "fake story," Democrats ruined whatever chance they had of keeping Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court, according to Frank Rich in a column slated for Sunday's New York Times, RAW STORY has learned.
While Rich attacks all sides for not "meeting even the low threshold of truthiness" during the confirmation hearings, some of his harshest criticisms are directed at Senator Kennedy and other Democrats for making a big deal out of Alito's membership in a conservative group that's been accused of bigotry. Rich notes that the story had already been exposed as "fake" in The Times. "The Republicans would never have been so sloppy," Rich writes.
This will be Rich's last column until spring. "Starting next week, I will be on a book leave, writing nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions," Rich informs his readers.
Once Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats decided to counter the Republicans' story by coming up with a fictional story of their own, or that's what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their fictional biography cast Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major evidence cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in reaction to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan Justice Department.
Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the ROTC on campus, adding that he did not remember having "done anything substantial in relation to this group, including renewing my membership." The Democrats plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy's insistence that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP's "repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay pronouncements." In one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation process -- a "Sunshine Boys"-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen Specter -- Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP "documents in the possession of the Library of Congress" to hunt down Alito's bigotry.
There was only one problem with the Democrats' fictional story line: It had been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Kennedy presented it to the nation.
Kirkpatrick reported that he had examined the same papers Kennedy was threatening to subpoena -- as well as some others at Princeton's own library -- and found no trace of Alito's involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a major donor. When the Senate committee did Kennedy's bidding and looked at those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November, calling the senator's bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had for keeping Alito off the court. It says everything about the Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.
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By setting their hopes on a "fake story," Democrats ruined whatever chance they had of keeping Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court, according to Frank Rich in a column slated for Sunday's New York Times, RAW STORY has learned.
While Rich attacks all sides for not "meeting even the low threshold of truthiness" during the confirmation hearings, some of his harshest criticisms are directed at Senator Kennedy and other Democrats for making a big deal out of Alito's membership in a conservative group that's been accused of bigotry. Rich notes that the story had already been exposed as "fake" in The Times. "The Republicans would never have been so sloppy," Rich writes.
This will be Rich's last column until spring. "Starting next week, I will be on a book leave, writing nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions," Rich informs his readers.
Once Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats decided to counter the Republicans' story by coming up with a fictional story of their own, or that's what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their fictional biography cast Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major evidence cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in reaction to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan Justice Department.
Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the ROTC on campus, adding that he did not remember having "done anything substantial in relation to this group, including renewing my membership." The Democrats plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy's insistence that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP's "repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay pronouncements." In one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation process -- a "Sunshine Boys"-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen Specter -- Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP "documents in the possession of the Library of Congress" to hunt down Alito's bigotry.
There was only one problem with the Democrats' fictional story line: It had been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Kennedy presented it to the nation.
Kirkpatrick reported that he had examined the same papers Kennedy was threatening to subpoena -- as well as some others at Princeton's own library -- and found no trace of Alito's involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a major donor. When the Senate committee did Kennedy's bidding and looked at those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November, calling the senator's bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had for keeping Alito off the court. It says everything about the Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.
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Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 3:19 PM
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