In an amazing display of gall mixed with either obliviousness or coded racist winks to his base, Bush today nominated Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court on the day Rosa Parks was laid to rest. Yahoo
For the clueless who thought taking a flyer on Roberts and the Miers silliness was good for liberals and would exact a compromise from the intractable and arrogant pasty white guys running the country, they give you Alito. Alito is nicknamed Scalito for his close ideological ties to Antonin Scalia who is the judicial symbol for far right thinking. The experts weighing in today are in almost universal agreement that this guy will strike down abortion rights, allow race based discrimination, allow disabiltiy discrimination, strike down the family leave act, allow unauthorized violations of privacy including strip searches, and strip all power from the Senate and give it to the Chancellor.
Yeah I made that last one up, but there are prior judicial precedents of Alito decisions in all the other categories. Think Progress. The Supreme Court actually had to strike down a prior decision of the guy that in itself attemtpted to completely strike down FMLA. This makes sense since the law mainly favors women who need 12 weeks after having a baby, and Alito has shown strong indications of being anti abortion including being the dissenting vote on a case that tried to force women to have to consult husbands before abortions.
Now I’m myself on the fence on that one. I think the father has a right to know. Not to stop her if she wants to abort, but a right to know and make his case for or against. Of course there are cases with abuse that could make this hard, but there are such a thing as consequences for your decisions and they’re not always easy to fix. But combined with his past decisions it’s part of a tapestry of 18th century thinking that has tried to do all it can to roll back the gains of the women’s rights movement. He’s also got a similar record and reputation in matters of civil rights. He ruled against the majority in a case in which he argued a Hotel should be allowed to discriminate in its hiring based on color.
I’ll be the first to admit that the Left can be full of shit too and take things to extremes and I think some people are doing that today. Alito has a reputation that should cause concern but the aforementioned cases I link to are in and of themselves not indicative of the monster he is being made out to be today. He may very well be adhering to strict readings of the law and constitution. Indeed Alito is a strict constructionist as I think he’d admit, but many of the siren voices on the left yelling that Rove has successfully diverted attention and gotten the conglemerate right wing news orgs willingly off the Libby story, is a bit much. Of course it’s a diversion for the day. The timing of this of course is curious in that it is the first news item of a new week following the ending of last weeks news cycle with the Libby indictment. Maybe Miers wast meant to be this diversion and a link in an ongoing headline chaser to divert attention from the indictments they knew were coming last week, all along. But I don’t buy that this is going away. Not that fast anyway.
They have to cover this. The media can’t ignore the nomination. But I’m watching CNN right now and the media is hammering White House Spokesman Scott McClellen over the scandal. I do think this will be back in the headlights in a day or 2 and coexist along side the upcoming Alito battle.
And battle it should be. Despite the overwrought reaction on the left this guy is clearly more representative of a way of thinking the left is supposed to be against. The pansy-ass Democrats have got to get off their asses for once and start letting someone know if they still stand for any of those traditional things they used to stand for. As Kos form Daily Kos put it today:
But this is the best possible scenario for Democrats as well. We now have a vehicle upon which to showcase the differences between us and Republicans, between liberalism and conservatism. This is a golden opportunity, and one wisely denied by Bush and Rove with the Robers and Miers nominations.
This is a gift to Democrats. Katrina, massive budget deficits, and continued economic hardship have proven that Republicans can’t govern. Iraq, Plame, and Osama Bin Laden have proven that Republicans can’t run an effective foreign policy or protect our nation. Now Scalito, along with Bush’s social security debacle, will prove to the American people that conservative ideology doesn’t have their best interests at heart.
Let the debate begin.
Let’s hope that debate does follow and that the Democrats finally stand up and play to win at the Poker table. But what should outrage people more is Bush putting this nomination out there on the day Rosa Parks is being memorialized and buried. Not only does it divert attention from her and the right wing agenda she so bravely fought against and helped lay low with her bravery, it’s an insult because of the ideology everyone knows Alito has and Parks would not have shared. She deserved to have her own day and an adminstration that actually valued her accomplishments, and that believed in what she fought for and stood for, would have given her that day. But these are guys that have a long dark tradition of sending little winks out to their ignorant racist, gunwielding, bible thumping supporters. They have sent these covert nods to these hate filled throwbacks in the past. Rove did it with his approach to the South during the 2000 primaries when he parlayed the inherent racism there by letting everyone know through phone polls that John McCain had a black child. They did it by having the first stop of that campaign take place at Bob Jones University in S Carolina, which hppened to be the only one in the country not allowing interracial dating at that time.
They have a long history of these unspoken nods to the racist and Jesus loving base that perhaps only coincidentally happen to be so aligned. Just like the bible belt just so happens to be the area of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and alcohilism. Now Parks herself was a Christian of some sort judging from her Memorial service I’m watching right now. For that I can only shrug regretfully and give her props for at least walking the walk unlike Bush and his core who would undoubtedly have tried to drag her off that bus as they would have stood aside the Romans and Pharisees and processed the crucifixion of a rebel voice through the same mechanisms of free market and capalist ideology that allows them to live with all the other atrocities they have comitted.
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