Exhibit A: Associate justice nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito:

Last week it came out that Alito was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) and even bragged about it on his Justice Department application in 1985. I didn’t know anything about CAP but this great post over at Obsidian Wings by a Princeton alumnus gives an outline of the organization and what it stood for.

CAP is generally described as ‘a conservative group’. But this is as misleading as calling the John Birch Society a ‘conservative group’ would be. There are lots of conservatives who are thoughtful and intelligent, and who have real intellectual integrity. Conservatives like this did not tend to join CAP. CAP was dedicated to finding outrages that it took to be caused by the horrible fact that women and minorities were being admitted to Princeton. The need to find outrages generally came first; any encounter with facts came later. For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was ‘his’) obsessions.

Alito now claims he has “no recollection” of being a member of CAP (convenient eh?) despite being quite proud of it 20 years ago. Remarkable powers of recall.

And let’s not forget that his disdain is not limited to co-education and minority representation. He would happily overturn or undermine Roe as well.

This is NOT going to be a good day for Bush. Laura must be out on her balcony chain smoking her nerves away…

This morning he announced his next nominee to the Supreme Court will be Harriet Miers, a woman with no judicial experience (not necessarily a bad thing), no clearly conservative opinions, and whose only qualification seemingly is a close allegiance to Georgie-boy himself. The tremendously aggravating David Frum puts it right over at the right wing National Review Online:

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. She served Bush well, but she is not the person to lead the court in new directions – or to stand up under the criticism that a conservative justice must expect.

Apparently Harriet doesn’t get out much. Maybe she’s thinking of an other George W. Bush. Add another log to the cronyism fire.

I guess we’ll all play the “what a great man he was” game but this is the guy who was against a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, privacy in the home, protecting rape victims, for executing minors and the mentally retarded, and presided over both impeaching Clinton for a blowjob and installing GWB in the White House in 2000.

Meanwhile, George W., the worst president ever, gets to choose two Supreme Court justices now.

It was a typical remark from a legal scholar who is said to have never lost a local spelling bee as a child and who once wrote an entire White House memorandum in French. In fact, an obsession with rhetorical precision is a central Roberts trait, said friends and former colleagues of the man nominated by President Bush to become a Supreme Court justice.

A cheerfully ruthless copy editor over the years, Judge Roberts has demanded verbal rigor from his colleagues and subordinates, refusing to tolerate the slightest grammatical slip, and boasting an exceptional vocabulary and command of literature himself.

Now as I’ve said before here, I don’t think it’s necessary to have a knee jerk anti-Roberts reaction to everything he says or does. Yes, we need to be concerned about his feelings on privacy and it’s become pretty clear that he’s pretty much a corporate sponsored corporate whore. But the bottom line is he will almost certainly be confirmed. Democrats have plenty of political currency that they could spend in other places. (Hillary – swallow your damn pride and drop the whole “I like war even more than you do” thing).

Yet why does the New York times, the paper of record and supposedly the greatest bastion of journalistic liberalism, insist on constantly cheering on Roberts? Why did they allow Judy Miller to commit near criminal acts in her WMD writing? What dirt does Karl Rove have on Arthur Sulzberger?