In this issue:
1. Careful
What You Wish For
2. Scooter
Indictment Skirts Issue
3. Step-Ma
Bell
4. Quick
Hits
5. New at Reason
Online - Whatever Became of the Gubernator?
6. News and
Events
Red-meat conservatives have their Supreme Court nominee in Samuel Alito. Now, can they get him to the court? Do they even care?
President George Bush's pick of Alito seems almost petulant, simultaneously daring Democrats to do their worst and challenging his own conservative base to step up and help do the heavy lifting of getting Alito confirmed. Both sides are already pointing toward the coming "war" and "battle" over Alito without word one from the nominee, although Alito does have quite the paper trail. The conservative-white male-Catholic mantra is being chanted on the Left as some sort of sui generis indictment of Alito, but that will not be enough to sink the nomination of a guy who has spent 15 years as a judge.
As media coverage reaches the saturation point on this process, the American public will have to see something about Alito that seems scary or odd or unfair (in the sense that you would not want to come before him in court, not just in terms of interest group identity politics) to balk at his confirmation to the Court. Alito has a reputation for being soft-spoken and polite, and he will need those qualities to be in evidence as this process unfolds.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/31/D8DJ2E380.html
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2. Scooter Indictment Skirts Issue
The other big story of the week neatly dovetails with the Alito nomination on the vitally important personnel-is-policy front, a reality one must never lose sight of in D.C. Scooter Libby was (and is) a die hard war hawk, a man utterly convinced that removing Saddam Hussein from power would be good for America. And what do you know, America up and invades Iraq and kicks Saddam out of power. Libby was so convinced of the correctness of his worldview that when a flaky former ambassador connected to the CIA threw sand in the White House's war machine, Libby moved to drum up a little bad press on an administration critic. This is pretty much standard operating procedure in Washington.
So that gives us a standard D.C. intra-government pissing match between the CIA and White House, which the CIA then takes to the Justice Department with a demand for an investigation. OK, a little bit like running to the principal, but still fair by political standards. The investigation starts, then Libby does the inexplicable-he lies to investigators. Repeatedly. Big elaborate, reckless lies. Why?
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