The Curse of Conservatism

In this excellent post by Firedoglake, This is how it's Done (scroll down), Jane Hamsher observes:

It is remarkably frustrating to blog the Alito hearings, feel the righteous indignation of people . . . that the supreme court is in danger of making a major lurch to the extreme right with the potential appointment of a bigoted, sexist, entitled, slavering chickenhawk like Alito, and see it reflected nowhere in the traditional media.

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How does the GOP keep them all in such abject subservience? An article from the Knight-Ridder news service shows the extremely organized pressure they bring to bear on anyone who deviates from their party message . . .

The article she references is a Commentary, Knight Ridder's Alito story: Factual and fair, which provides a glimpse of the unrelenting push by the Republican machine to recast "the Alito story" in a manner intended to obfuscate the facts of Alito's conservative views. It also shows the larger picture: No opinion, no news column in the media can escape the Republican spin filter, which consists of a rapid response setting forth the view/spin of the party, the accusation that the original piece was wrong, slanted, partisan, etc., followed by the personal attack on the messenger/reporter.

As the Knight Ridder piece explains, it originally ran a story (Review of cases shows Alito to be staunch conservative - which I read at the time in the Philadelphia Inquirer) in early December, that concluded that Alito was truly a conservative (what a surprise, what a shock). This conclusion was based upon an analysis of all (311) published cases in which Alito wrote either the majority or dissenting/concurring opinion during his 15 year tenure on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. In other words, he didn't get the name Scalito for nothing. As the Commentary noted:

They concluded that, "although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business."

You might find this neither surprising nor controversial. Alito, after all, was nominated by a president who said that his ideal Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the high court's most reliably conservative members.

You'd be wrong.

No, what followed was the dissemination of a Senate Republican Conference memo, letter to the editor to the Inquirer and publication of an op-ed piece by a former Alito clerk, all denouncing the original article as inaccurate and biased. Again, as the Commentary explained:

Knight Ridder's story analyzed only Alito's published opinions because what a judge writes from the bench is the best window into his or her legal reasoning. A judge's unexplained votes are often on procedural grounds that have nothing to do with legal philosophy. And the Knight Ridder story didn't say that Alito never sided with plaintiffs who alleged employment discrimination, criminal defendants or consumers suing businesses. It reported accurately that he seldom did, and that the pattern of his written opinions was unmistakable.

During the Alito confirmation hearings, the story was mentioned and a Republican Senator remarked that the article had been "rather completely discredited" by the Republican Conference memo, even though the facts cited in that memo were wrong. The next step in the process was the attack by the Republican National Committee on the reporter, trying to make him out to be personally biased. And, as Hamsher reminds, "let's just remember the fact they were trying to dispute -- that Alito is a conservative." The Commentary states:

This hysteria over a carefully researched article that documents the obvious - that Samuel Alito is a judicial conservative - is the latest example of a disturbing trend of attacking the messenger instead of debating difficult issues.

Fact-based reporting is the lifeblood of a democracy. It gives people shared information on which to make political choices. But as people in new democracies risk their lives to gather such information, in this country fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington.

Oh, those silly little things called "facts" - what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.

And there is another part of this that is ironic, to say the least. In fact, it's almost funny. After all, I certainly would be gravely insulted if I were labeled as a conservative in my philosophy, but why do the conservatives run from the description as though it were a curse? I do think it's something to be ashamed of, but I'm surprised that they agree with me. After all, the original article merely concluded that Alito was a conservative and this is what resulted.

The real problem, however, is that the continual Republican spin/attack program adopted by the Republicans creates the same status for the media, which is that it has little or no credibility, much in the same way as the Republicans have managed to do with the Democrats.

And this is a dangerous state of affairs for us all. There needs to be some entity that can speak the truth and be believed. I know that I don't trust the Republican party a whit; the rest, including the media, are question marks. How does a society function that way? It's one thing to have a dysfunctional family, it's a lot worse to have a disfunctional society, but I think that is where we've devolved.

Just one more thing to thank Bush for.