The Dish

A soldier in Iraq weighs in.

Can we please have a debate about Alito without descending immediately into inflammatory rhetoric about his ethnicity? Anti-Alito morons who touted his failure to win a case against the mob seem to have started this, according to Chris Matthews. Mehlman and Hatch seem to be picking up the guantlet. Jeez. If it’s this ugly on Day One …

A blogger comes clean:

I have a confession; I supported the war. I was one of the “liberal hawks” who focused only on the (true) horror of the Hussein regime, without listening to the nagging doubts of caution and the fear of pride that I felt right above my belt. No, I too was swept up in the bright hubristic vision, and thought that we could re-make the broken map. I remember thinking such silly things at the time:

The invasion will be welcomed, after the people realize Hussein is gone for good.
Iraq is at heart a middle-class country.
We could move our bases out of Saudi Arabia, and have a stable base of power in the Middle East.
The other Satrapies will democratize because of our example in Iraq, and our menace.
If the Shia and Sunnis and Kurds don’t get along, we’ll just break the country up.
We’re the only remaining superpower. We have a moral obligation to project power against dictators.

Bullshit.

It’s painful to read. And no, I’m not where this guy is. I haven’t given up yet.

There are still some in the hierarchy with open hearts.

An interesting fisking of the current talking points against Alito.

A fascinating moment in a Guardian interview. Noam Chomsky refuses to believe there was a genocidal “massacre” at Srebrenica. That’s a little much even for a Guardian journalist.

A reader looks into one of Alito’s rulings:

I linked to the website listing Alito cases and picked one at random – Doe v. Groody. Take a look at Alito’s dissent.

What’s interesting about it is that it reaches a statist result (i.e., he believed that a search warrant authorized the search of two persons who were living in the residence to be searched but who were not listed among those persons to be searched) by ignoring the plain text of the warrant and relying, instead, on the equivalent of “what the legislature (in this case, the officers who drafted the application for the warrant and the proposed warrant) meant the warrant to say”.

The warrant appears not to conform to the application – it was drafted more narrowly (perhaps by mistake), but c’est la vie. That’s not “strict constructionism” at all; it’s pure originalism. He didn’t decide the case strictly according to the text, using “originalism” to determine the meaning of an ambiguous provision. Instead, he overrode the text by reference to intent.

From a brief look, the reader looks correct. Check it out. It cuts to the core of someone’s judicial philosophy.

Blankenhorn and Gallagher keep missing the point. Ampersand explains.

The good news is that they’re now allowed in. The bad news is: they can’t talk to the detainees.

By the logic that a judge should be assessed by the results of his decisions and not by his judicial reasoning, the anti-Alito forces should at least acknowledge that Alito recently upheld the constitutionality of partial birth abortion. His reason? He was following Supreme Court precedent. So is he therefore pro-partial birth abortion? The answer is: we don’t know from the case. Volokh has the details. Somehow I don’t see Planned Parenthood celebrating Alito’s upholding of a constitutional right to abort an unborn child very late in the pregnancy. But by their own reasoning, why not?