There is more than enough blame to go around for the disastrous damage done to our international standing and national security by the uproar over the use of coercive interrogation methods — all of them "torture," in the parlance of many critics — to squeeze potentially life-saving information out of suspected terrorists.
A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations’ coverage of Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination.
Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some (but not all) reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear, especially by "distancing himself" from past statements that (these reporters imply) show him to be a conservative ideologue.
I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of the New York Times’ editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito’s more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn’t find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans … [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."
What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the highly misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation’s laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.
You might think that something huge was at stake from the sound and fury accompanying the November 30 Supreme Court argument about New Hampshire’s restrictions on minors’ access to abortion, and the pending challenge to the 2003 act of Congress banning "partial-birth" abortion.
Abortion-rights advocates warn that any decision upholding restrictions on abortion in either case would jeopardize women’s health and set the stage for evisceration of Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion advocates portray the lower-court decisions striking down these laws before they took effect as steps toward the destruction of the American family and the legalization of infanticide.
The reality is less momentous: No matter who wins, the decisions in these cases are unlikely to harm anyone’s health, to prevent anyone who is sure she wants an abortion from getting one, or to save many (if any) fetuses. As is usual in abortion battles, the interest-group hysteria and media hype overstate what’s really at stake.
Which is not to say that nothing is at stake. In the New Hampshire case, in particular, abortion-rights groups have leveraged legitimate concern over possible medical emergencies in fewer than one in 1,000 cases into decisions by federal district and appeals courts striking down the entire parental-notification law.
So for now, at least, clinics are free to perform abortions on any 13-year-old girls who walk through their doors, with no parental or judicial involvement at all.
Based on the comments at oral argument, at least five justices seemed sympathetic to the Bush administration’s quite reasonable suggestion that they uphold the parental-notification law except in the tiny number of cases where it would dangerously delay abortions in medical emergencies.
Those seeking to paint Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as a scary, back-alley-abortion-promoting, patriarchy-pushing, theocracy-loving, civil-rights-hating, machine-gun-legalizing, right-wing extremist got a little ammunition this week. But not much.
"We do not torture," President Bush declared on November 7. But hardly anybody outside America believes him. And fewer and fewer Americans believe that he has given much more than lip service to his ostensible policy of treating suspected enemy combatants humanely.
Liberal critics and many media outlets have spewed tons of misleading stuff about Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., particularly about his supposed views on abortion and about the significance of two Sandra Day O’Connor opinions disagreeing with prior Alito opinions. So here’s some straight stuff.
"The Supreme Court [grapples with] the widest range of issues of importance to the law. To give some recent examples: What innovations are patentable and what should be the role of juries in deciding whether a patent is valid or has been infringed? Are police officers entitled to ask the passenger of a car to step outside when they have made a lawful traffic stop? Does the First Amendment protect a government worker if his boss thinks his complaints are a nuisance to the work of the office?…
Perhaps the most depressing thing about the CIA leak investigation consuming official Washington is that — regardless of whether crimes have been committed — so many of the principal players on all sides have been guilty of petty, ignoble and (in some cases) less-than-honest conduct.
"His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion."
"She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."
So reports conservative writer and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, in National Review Online. Unless White House Counsel Harriet Miers explains that she was joking or Frum was hallucinating, this alone may cast enough doubt on her judgment to warrant a "no" vote on her Supreme Court nomination.
But before detailing Miers’s liabilities, I should acknowledge her virtues. She is an impressive person with an admirable record of devotion to duty, self-effacing industriousness, quiet competence, public service, and a kind and caring heart.
Miers did very well at law school. She has been a pioneering career woman — the first hired by a big Texas law firm; the first to become president of the firm; the first to head the Dallas and then the Texas state bar associations, where she was known for reaching out to women and minorities; a successful corporate litigator; an energetic supporter of community services, including legal assistance for poor people; a member of the Dallas City Council; the head of the Texas Lottery Commission; a high-level White House official; a loving caregiver for her elderly mother; and more.
Moreover, on the current Court, Miers’s Texas roots and lack of prior judicial service may be assets. Her background as a litigator trained at Southern Methodist University’s law school would bring some diversity of experience to a Court already staffed by eight former federal appellate judges, six of whom trained at Harvard Law School. And Chief Justices William Rehnquist, Earl Warren, and John Marshall and Justices Lewis Powell and Byron White had not previously been judges either.
