January 11, 2006

But Enough About You, Judge; Let's Hear What I Have to Say

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - The Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. were supposed to be about the judge, but on Tuesday it sometimes seemed as though somebody forgot to tell the senators on the Judiciary Committee.

The lure of 50 cameras and the captive audience in the Senate Hart Office Building appeared too much of a temptation for some of Capitol Hill's windiest lions, who began by promising not to run a marathon session of questions, then did so anyway.

At one point Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was even granted two extra minutes from the committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania - drawing groans from colleagues, among them Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

"Be quiet over there," Mr. Kennedy admonished his fellow committee members, to laughter. "Scurrilous dogs."

The highest ratio of words per panelist to words per nominee was that of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, who managed to ask five questions in his 30-minute time allotment.

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

The audience laughed appreciatively.

While most of the senators were at least as verbose as they were at the September confirmation hearings of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the crispest was the chairman, Mr. Specter, who dispensed with an introduction on Tuesday and was immediately out of the gate with a question about abortion.

"Judge Alito, do you accept the legal principles articulated in Griswold vs. Connecticut that the liberty clause in the Constitution carries with it the right to privacy?" Mr. Specter asked.

Judge Alito, as Chief Justice Roberts had before him, said that he did, indicating that he at least did not rule out the pivotal legal underpinning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion.

Mr. Specter then moved into the same line of questioning he had used for the chief justice, even displaying the same chart that listed the 38 Supreme Court cases since Roe that affirmed the right to abortion.

Like almost everything else, the chart created an opportunity for more words from members of the committee. As an aide held the chart up behind Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who opposes abortion rights, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who supports them, was moved to crack, "Just balance that on Orrin's head."

Mr. Specter, who also supports abortion rights, chimed in, "It's a good photo-op for Senator Hatch."

Mr. Hatch, grinning, would have none of it. "He wants that over by Leahy," he said.

Mr. Hatch was Judge Alito's friendliest inquisitor, and often seemed like a concerned defense lawyer lobbing softballs to his client.

"So let me just ask you directly, on the record, Are you against women and minorities attending colleges?" Mr. Hatch asked.

"Absolutely not, Senator, no," Judge Alito replied.

Mr. Specter interjected, chuckling, "A tough question, Orrin, a tough question."

Mr. Hatch shot back, "It's a good question, though."

The most indignant questioner was Mr. Leahy, who went on a ramble through his own Irish and Italian roots and compared the discrimination that his parents and grandparents faced with the hard-luck story of Judge Alito's father, who came to the United States from Italy as an infant, grew up in poverty and had a difficult time getting a teaching job.

Given that history, Mr. Leahy said, he was particularly troubled that Judge Alito would have joined the conservative college group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, which resisted the admission of women and members of minorities.

"Why in heaven's name, Judge, with your background and what your father faced, why in heaven's name were you proud of being part of C.A.P.?" Mr. Leahy asked.

Judge Alito, who acknowledged having listed the group on a 1985 job application, responded, "I have racked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization."

The judge's toughest questioner was Mr. Schumer, who late in the day bored in with follow-up after follow-up about whether Judge Alito thought that the Constitution protected the right to abortion. In 1985, Judge Alito - then applying for a position in the Justice Department - contended that the Constitution did not guarantee such a right.

But on Tuesday, Judge Alito repeatedly refused to say what he now thought of the issue, exasperating Mr. Schumer.

"I do have to tell you, Judge, your refusal I find troubling," he said, likening the side-stepping to the response that might have been given by a friend who had told him 20 years earlier, "You know, I really can't stand my mother-in-law.'

Mr. Schumer spun out the rest of the hypothetical: "And a few weeks ago, I saw him and I said, 'You still hate your mother-in-law?' He said, 'Well, I'm now married to her daughter for 21 years, not one year.' I said, 'No, no, no, do you still hate your mother-in-law?' And he said, 'Mmm, can't really comment.' "

Mr. Schumer paused. "What do you think I'd think?" he asked the nominee.

The barest of smiles crossed Judge Alito's face. "Senator, I think --"

Mr. Schumer, in the theme of the day, cut him off. "Let me just move on," he said. Mr. Schumer seemed to notice that Judge Alito's mother-in-law was in the hearing room.

"I have not changed my mother-in-law," Judge Alito offered.

As always, the senator had the last word. "I'm glad you haven't, because she seems nice," Mr. Schumer said.

Biden His Time
Judge Alito's low-affect tour de force.
Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:01 a.m.

If everyone in America--the butcher down the block, the college professor, the car mechanic, the mother of two working at home, the CNN analyst--knows that the U.S. senators questioning Sam Alito are posing, are using their airtime to promote themselves and play to their base, then will anyone in America be impressed by what the senators say, or how they pose? Isn't that like saying, "I know it's all spin, but he spun me like a top!"?

If everyone in America--again, everyone--knows Judge Alito's job is to reveal as little as possible about his true thoughts and convictions while coming across in the hearings as a well balanced, intelligent and experienced person, will anyone come away with a solid conviction, as opposed to a hunch, that Judge Alito will be an honest and reliable interpreter of the Constitution?

It is odd that in the age of big media, when everything is shown to us live, up close, and on a high-resolution screen, we still, in the pursuit of insight and knowledge, have to spend all our time reading between the lines.

I wish they would be, thought they could be, honest. "You are bad because you are not a liberal, and I am a liberal so I vote against you. Feh." "Of course I think Roe v. Wade was badly thought through, and you probably admit as much yourself, Senator, in your private thoughts."

In a way, the whole manufactured issue of Princeton at least clears the air a little. Mr. Alito, in the late 1970s, apparently belonged to an alumni group that had taken issue with the liberalization that was at that time sweeping that university and others. Liberal senators are suggesting he didn't want women or blacks admitted. Judge Alito says he doesn't remember exactly why he joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or what issue or issues compelled his joining.

He was given the opportunity to note at the hearings that Princeton at the time was considering throwing ROTC off the campus. Wouldn't Judge Alito, who was a cadet, likely have opposed such a move? But Judge Alito didn't take the lifeline, responding with seeming candor, that he couldn't say that was part of his thinking, he didn't remember. I think he will beat back this issue with ease--Americans are used to charges like this and have been used to them for 30 years--and Judge Alito doesn't seem remotely like a person who is or has been hostile to blacks, women or anyone else. As a young middle-class kid of Italian ancestry at an Ivy League school, his sympathies would likely have gone in the direction of anyone who felt that he was on the outside, not the inside.

But here's where the issue clears some air. Either liberals like Ted Kennedy really believe that conservatives harbor deep in their hearts an animus toward women, and blacks, and Hispanics, and everyone who is not a white male, or liberals simply enjoy, for reasons that are cynical and perhaps also psychological ("The people I fight are bad; this buttresses my belief that I, in spite of what I know about myself, am good"), suggesting that conservatives are full of narrow-minded bigotry and hatred. Maybe a Republican senator could bring this question to the floor, and ask Pat Leahy or Mr. Kennedy. The thing is, it is a mystery: Do they really think that about us, or are they just playing games and jerking everyone around?

Also: wouldn't it be nice if the senators suggesting bigotry apologized to Mrs. Alito for causing her distress? Oh, I wish they'd apologize to the country for causing it distress. Anyway, they made a mistake. Her tears presage his victory.

Let's cause some senators distress. The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations--as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back--you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He's human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

In this, in the hearings, he is unlike Ted Kennedy in that he doesn't seem driven by some obscure malice--Uh, I, uh, cannot, uh, remembuh why I hate you, Judge Alioto, but there, uh, must be a good reason and I will, um, damn well find it. When he peers over his glasses at Judge Alito he is like an old woman who's unfortunately senile and quite sure the teapot on the stove is plotting against her. Mr. Biden is also unlike Chuck Schumer in that he doesn't ask questions with an air of, With this one I'm going to trap you and leave you flailing like a bug in a bug zapper--we're going to hear your last little crackling buzz any minute now!

But what interests me most is Judge Alito, and his ability to just sit there and listen. To show nothing, like a stunned ox, or, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put in on CNN, like a person with clear judicial demeanor.

How does he do it? This wonderful look of enforced blandness. It's a low affect tour de force.

And it cannot be easy. When Mr. Biden says things like, "Try to follow me, Judge Alito," as he goes on one of his long, sterile journeys, I wonder if Judge Alito has to control himself with an act of will. I wonder if he has an inner Regis Philbin, and wants to throw out his arms and say, "Follow you? If I follow you, we'll both wind up lost!" When Mr. Biden says, "Now this is a somewhat subtle point," I wonder if Judge Alito wants to say, "Joe, if it were a subtle point you wouldn't be making it!"

This is the authentic sound, though not the authentic words, of Joe Biden, and this is what Judge Alito has to discipline himself not to respond to:

What if a fella--I'm just hypothesizing here, Judge Alito--what if a fella said, "Well I don't want to hire you because I don't like the kind of eyeglasses you wear," or something like that. Follow my thinking here. Or what if he says "I won't hire you because I don't like it that you wear black silk stockings and a garter belt. And your name is Fred." Strike that--just joking, trying to lighten this thing up, we can all be too serious. Every 10 years when you see me at one of these hearings I am different from every other member of Judiciary in that I have more hair than the last time. You know why? It's all the activity in my brain! It breaks through my skull and nourishes my follicles with exciting nutrients! Try to follow me.

Must he sit there bland-faced and unmoving as they say what they say? Yes, of course. Judge Alito and the White House know they have to let these men talk. They don't want the senators to feel resentful or frustrated. They know each senator feels he has to play to his base. They know the senators are, by nature, like Conair 2000 hairdryers: They just love to blow, and hard. Fwwaaaaahhhhhhhhh. And they know it is good, it is helpful, to let each senator reveal himself through his own words. I think senators feel that their words, when strung together, become little bridges. I think the White House feels that their words, when strung together, become little nooses.

But this one is all kind of over, isn't it? It definitively ended when Mrs. Alito walked out in tears. But to me it seemed over on day one. The Democrats on the committee seemed forlorn in a way, as if they knew deep in their hearts that nobody's listening. Two decades ago they could make their speeches and fake their indignation and accuse a Robert Bork of being a racist chauvinist woman hater and their accusations would ring throughout the country. But now the media they relied on have lost their monopoly. Everyone who's fired at gets to fire back, shot for shot.

It's all changed. Which is one reason Judge Alito will be confirmed, and another reason I like Joe Biden. He still has the old spirit--an ingenuous spirit, a crazy one, a stupid one. But spirit nonetheless.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays

The calm judge and the angry senator

It was a stunt, and it failed in ways that prove how Senate Democrats have tossed reason out the window when it comes to Judge Samuel Alito. When the facts don't support you, get dramatic.

Around noon yesterday, during what were until then smooth and uneventful hearings, an angry Sen. Ted Kennedy demanded that 30-year-old documents about the now-defunct Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or CAP, be entered in the record. Would Republicans try to keep the documents from view? Would the documents reveal damning facts about Judge Alito? On both accounts, the answer was no.

After lunch, Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent aides to retrieve the documents -- the private papers of longtime National Review publisher and onetime Concerned Alumni of Princeton leader William Rusher -- which are housed in the Library of Congress. The documents -- internal correspondence, magazines, minutes of meetings and other items -- would show whether Judge Alito was an active member of a group which, over the years, counted among its members at least a few people who made racist or sexist statements in CAP's publication, Prospect.

The answer was no. Seven weeks ago, New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick found that the documents contain little or nothing about Judge Alito. The judge was not "among the group's major donors," Mr. Kirkpatrick found. "He was not an active leader of the group, and two of his classmates who were involved and Mr. Rusher said they did not remember his playing a role." Another member appeared on Fox News to confirm that. To judge by Mr. Kennedy's fiery accusations, though, he is bargaining that most viewers haven't read the article.

Why even talk about all this? The only explanations are that Senate Democrats are utterly bereft of anything else to raise -- any issue of substance -- and their far-left financiers are so intent on torpedoing Judge Alito's nomination that they sent an ultimatum to Mr. Kennedy and others: Derail this nominee, or else.

The partisan drama cannot detract from the facts. Judge Alito gave another day of calm and reasoned testimony in spite of the fireworks, just as he did on Monday and Tuesday. He appears ever more qualified for the bench. Not that that matters to Senate Democrats. If Mr. Kennedy's stunt is any indication, the Democrats' grounds on which to filibuster -- and to provoke the nuclear option in return -- are dropping lower and lower.

The Battle of Princeton
Borking has lost its bite.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, January 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The grand hulk of Ted Kennedy ranted that he wanted to subpoena the papers of former National Review publisher William Rusher to get to the bottom of Samuel Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. At this moment, one sensed that perhaps at last the ghost of Robert Bork had finally been laid to rest. Borking was once a Democratic smear tactic. This week--amid intellectually exhausted and politically befuddled Democrats--it became a laugh track.

It is widely believed that all this started in 1987 when Sen. Kennedy raced to the Senate floor to bellow that "Robert Bork's

America

is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution." But Borking began the year before, when President Reagan nominated William Rehnquist to be chief justice.

The locus of opposition turned not on his 15 years of high court rulings but on allegations he'd harassed black and Hispanic voters in the early 1960s in Phoenix. This same swamp tossed up the revelation that the deed to Justice Rehnquist's former Phoenix house, purchased in 1961, held a 1928 covenant barring its sale to nonwhites. "The basic issue is his sensitivity to civil rights," said Ted Kennedy, the Democrats' ancient mariner. A Republican-controlled Senate voted to approve the Rehnquist nomination 65-33 (including 16 Democrats).

The next nominee to encounter liberalism's newest notions of constitutional law was Clarence Thomas, in 1991. Then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden to Anita Hill: "I must ask you now to describe once again and more fully the behavior that you have alleged he engaged in while your boss." Whereupon, "the Coke can" entered the archives of advice and consent. Judge Thomas's nomination was approved 52-48 by a Democratic-controlled Senate whose Majority Leader George Mitchell, an architect of our current scorched-earth politics, currently works as a statesman.

Though forced to stare upward at his questioners for four days, Judge Alito, like John Roberts before him, has been the largest presence in the room. This hearing makes clear that those of us who opposed Harriet Miers's nomination were right. She or anyone of her inexperience would have transformed the committee Democrats into the legal heavyweights, handing down lectures on "rights" and moral punctiliousness. They would have turned Ms. Miers inside out. Instead they got a member of the Federalist Society with more than enough mental firepower.

Since 1982, the Federalist Society's main purpose has been to create robust conservative legal theories and smart judges. President Bush nominated a class of them to the appellate bench. In response the minority Democrats largely abandoned Borking in favor of hostage-taking, thus delivering yet another innovation to our politics, the judicial filibuster. This in turn led to the threat of using the "nuclear option" in an institution known to our forbearers as "the world's greatest deliberative body."

This Roman circus dissipates, however, with the arrival of Supreme Court nominations, which are held in full view of the American people. And what has been witnessed so far is first John Roberts and now Samuel Alito discussing the law, rather than Coke cans, which puts their Democratic questioners on unfamiliar ground.

It appears that the liberal legal critique of conservative jurisprudence is largely incoherent. "Out of the mainstream" is a phrase and nothing more. Interesting notions of the individual's relationship to the state surfaced in the preprinted opening statements of Sens. Kennedy and Leahy, then disappeared. Judge Alito's most thoughtful remarks on justice and the law emerged in exchanges with Sens. Grassley and Sessions. Why do the Democrats seem flat-lined? Because in the 20 years that such liberal opposition leaders as Ralph Neas and Nan Aron taught them to contest nominees with propaganda, their Senate students have largely stopped thinking about the content of the Supreme Court.

They should have kept up. Thanks in large part to a half-century of judicial decisions based on no consistent standard, constitutional law today is a dense and tangled thicket understood only by practicing specialists like Samuel Alito. No surprise, then, that when a Sen. Durbin or Feinstein recited a staff-written question on some point of law and got a careful parsing back from Judge Alito on Bray or Rybar or stare decisis, their follow-up was generally of a piece with Sen. Feinstein's after discussing the machine-gun case: "That's a difficult extrapolation for me to understand, but it's not dispositive." Joe Biden shrewdly avoided this trap by using his time for magical mystery tours through his own life.

The left-wing opposition groups are reported to be frustrated that their standard-bearers are "letting Alito off the hook." What hook? Neither Sam Alito nor John Roberts remotely represents Ted Kennedy's famous "Robert Bork's

America

" speech. Reasonable people can disagree on the views of these conservative jurists, but first we need reasonable people.

It was apparent on Tuesday that the Bork irregulars' long march was ending at the Battle of Princeton. Ted Kennedy tilted his full 20 minutes at the Princeton windmill, producing nothing more than a laughable spat with Arlen Specter, which ended with Sen. Kennedy weirdly admitting, "I regret I haven't been down in the gym since before Christmas."

Late in the afternoon Lindsey Graham puckishly engaged in what for all the world sounded like a, well, filibuster, whose effect was to drive Sen. Schumer's turn to the exact stroke of 6, when every cable network switched to news programming. Alone now on C-Span, Sen. Schumer rode the thin reed of the 1985 job r�sum�. Going nowhere, he told an odd mother-in-law story, which Judge Alito mistook for a question: "Senator, I think--." Sen. Schumer cut him off: "--Just let me move on."

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

It was during the second day of questioning that Sam Alito's wife broke down, wept and left the room after hearing Sen. Kennedy imply that her husband was a bigot.

What was Kennedy's evidence?

In 1985, Sam Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton. He had joined to protest the ouster of ROTC from campus. Alito was neither an officer nor active, but like future Sen. Bill Bradley, he joined.

What were CAP's sins? Headed by National Review publisher William Rusher, CAP had a magazine called Prospect that carried an essay opposing affirmative action and regretting that Princeton had ever gone co-ed.

Yet support for single-sex education, as practiced at Smith and dozens of women's colleges, is hardly a mark of bigotry. And opposition to affirmative action and quotas is core conservative dogma.

So, what is going on here? Answer: a smear. Because Judge Alito belonged to an alumni group that had a magazine which had an offensive article, he must share those views. Therefore, he is a bigot and the Senate must reject him as morally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

This is a textbook example of what liberals used to call McCarthyism.

Why are the Democrats disgracing themselves and disgusting decent people with such tactics? Why are they desperate to kill the nomination of Sam Alito?

The answer, in a word, is abortion. By the end of the third day of hearings, analysts had toted up the questions. The subject that had been brought up in more questions than any other was abortion.

Why? Because, as Sen. Chuck Schumer fears, Judge Alito may just vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

For Alito has said that while he respects precedents and has an "open mind," Roe v. Wade is not some "super-duper precedent" or "inexorable command." And Sam's mom, in her 90s, when asked where her son stands on abortion, replied, "Of course, he's against it."

Why has the Democratic Party become a party of fanatics on abortion? Because the feminists of NARAL and NOW regard abortion as a sacrament and will cut dead any Democrat who fails to protect a woman's "right to choose" to kill her unborn baby.

Which brings us to the unspoken issue here. Judge Alito is Catholic. If confirmed, he will join three other Catholics on the bench: Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who have already voted to overturn Roe.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee sit four Catholic Democrats: Leahy, Kennedy, Biden and Durbin. All have 100 percent pro-abortion voting records. All have attacked Alito out of fear he may overturn Roe.

Query: Why is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops so deathly silent in this war of Catholics to decide if abortion on demand is to remain the law of the land forever in God's Country?

Where are the Catholic echoes of John Paul II's condemnations of the Culture of Death?

Where is Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, who was designated to address the moral obligations of Catholic politicians? When John Kerry ran as the Democratic nominee, McCarrick's task force refused to tell priests to deny him Communion. Suddenly, pro-abortion Kerry was seen at the altar rail and won half the Catholic vote.

Said McCarrick, "Our task force does not advocate the denial of Communion for Catholic politicians," for, otherwise, the "sacred nature of the Eucharist could be trivialized and might be turned into a partisan political battleground."

What should bishops do when Catholic politicians fight to uphold a decision that has caused the slaughter of thousands of times as many Holy Innocents as were massacred by King Herod?

Cardinal McCarrick urged "new efforts to teach clearly, advocate effectively, organize and mobilize Catholic laity, and to engage, persuade and challenge Catholic politicians to act on the moral teaching of our church."

Fair enough, Your Eminence.

Sixty-six years ago, Bishop Clemens von Galen took to the pulpit of Munster Cathedral to damn Hitler's regime at the peak of its power for "plain murder" in its euthanasia program and to direct Catholics to "withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated by their ... ungodly behavior."

Cardinal von Galen is headed for sainthood.

What is asked of you, Cardinal McCarrick, and your fellow bishops is less heroic. Just issue a statement before the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, 2006, declaring:

"We pray to God that Roe v. Wade is overturned. We commend all Catholics and fellow citizens working toward that goal. We condemn any Catholic politician who would deny a seat on the Supreme Court to a fellow Catholic -- on the grounds that he might vote to overturn this abomination."

That too much to ask, Your Eminence? As Dante said, there is a special place in hell for those who, in times of moral crisis, fail to take a stand. By the way, Dante put a lot of bishops in there.

ABC's Tapper Blog: Oops! One Ted Kennedy CAP Quote Came From a Satire

Posted by Tim Graham on January 13, 2006 - 11:16.

Kudos to ABC reporter Jake Tapper, whose "Down and Dirty" blog carries an interview with Dinesh D'Souza, [Editor's note: CAP editor D'Souza is a person of color; this alone is prima facia evidence that CAP was not seeking to bar minorities from Princeton.] an editor for the magazine of Concerned Alumni of Princeton from 1983 to 1985, the time frame in which Sam Alito claimed membership in CAP when applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department. As Brent Bozell noted, the network coverage of CAP has skipped over the responsible step of checking with the accused. Maybe the story was just too good to check. D'Souza said humorless Ted Kennedy actually made a boo-boo: one quoted article in the CAP magazine was a satire, not a serious argument:

First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire.

The 1983 essay "In Defense of Elitism" by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic..."

The essay may not have been funny, D'Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.

"I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them," D'Souza said. "It was a satire."

One of the left-wing reports on this came from Eyal Press in The Nation, and there is NO hint in that piece of a satire as Press pounds D'Souza. The same goes for People for the American Way's press release.

(Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg at NRO)