I don't believe it! Who saw it coming? How could this happen?
(Yeah, I'm no more convincing with playacting than the administration is.)
In a completely unsurprising turn of events, following Bush's failed (though one has to wonder if it wasn't supposed to) attempt to bring the conservative-but-not-conservative-enough Gidget-esque Bush loyalist Harriet Miers into the O'Connor's Supreme Court seat, Bush has now brought in a candidate who Pat Robertson calls "a grand-slam home run."
Is there really ANYONE, no matter what side of the fence, comfortable with someone Robertson thinks is so fabulous? Would you even hire someone to pick up your garbage who Robertson got that excited about?
Let's all feign surprise that Bush found an utterly qualified man for the job who also just happens to have been placed in his current seat by Bush Sr.; who just happens to be a wealthy, male extremist who is antiabortion and pro-gun rights with a career history of also being racist, xenophobic, misogynist: qualities which, to the wing of conservatives Bush likes to mollify, make him PERFECTLY qualified. For the job, one might recall, which requires a greater sense of fairness and objectivity than nearly any other in the nation. For a court which once struck down his lone dissent, ironically, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where Alito was trying to pass a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses and made some really choice comments about how the danger this posed to women in abusive relationships wasn't worth anyone's worry. "The plaintiffs failed to show even roughly how many of the women in this small group would actually be adversely affected..." That small group of over 5 million women in the U.S. every year in abusive relationships?
Want some more Alito background (who knows, maybe you're just aching to have one more reason to groan today)?
Have at it: