by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, November 1, 2005 3:39 P.M. EST

The Boy Who Cried Bork
Predictably, the extreme left greeted the nomination of Justice-designate Sam Alito with ritualistic wails of complaint. The New York Times published an editorial denouncing Alito on the following grounds:

• President Bush decided to "pander to his right wing."
  
  
• "A close and careful review of Judge Alito's record" is "crucial" because Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been "the swing vote of moderation on so many issues."
  
  
• Alito has an "apparent hostility to abortion," having taken the "extreme position" that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit a state from imposing an "outrageous requirement" that a married woman inform her "spouse" before getting an abortion. (The Supreme Court disagreed with this position--a decision that underscores just how ludicrous is the court's "privacy" jurisprudence. In less than 30 years, the right to marital privacy asserted in Griswold v. Connecticut morphed into a woman's right to abort her husband's child without telling him.)
  
  
• Alito has ruled against such Times-favored classes of litigants as discrimination plaintiffs and "black death-row inmates" and in favor of Times-disfavored classes such as gun owners and state governments.
  
  
• Alito is male.

The Times actually calls the Alito pick "yet another occasion to bemoan lost opportunities," and opines: "Mr. Bush could have signaled that he was prepared to move on to a more expansive presidency by nominating a qualified moderate who could have garnered a nearly unanimous Senate vote rather than another party-line standoff." In other words, Bush should have betrayed those who voted for him by appointing a justice who would have pleased those who voted against him.

This is all so silly it can't be taken seriously, and that's the point. The extreme left is stuck in 1987, hoping to recapture the glory of its vile campaign of slander against Robert Bork. Here's a MoveOn.org e-mail from yesterday:

This morning, with his administration growing weaker by the day, President Bush caved to pressure from the radical fringe of the Republican Party and nominated Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. Alito is a notoriously right-wing judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He has consistently ruled to strip basic protections from workers, women, minorities and the disabled in favor of unchecked power for corporations and special interests.

As reader Bob Schena notes:

I'm sitting here watching someone on Fox News, a radical leftist Democrat I think, fulminating about Judge Alito being outside the mainstream. What does that mean? Do the members of the Supreme Court roll on the floor, writhing from uncontrolled paroxysms of laughter, when reading one of Alito's opinions? Is he always in the minority on his current court? Is he in the minority 75% of the time? Fifty percent? In his 15 years on the court wouldn't his radical, nonmainstream opinions have been newsworthy? Can this stuff from the left possibly be effective?

No, it cannot. Even funnier is this quote from Ted Kennedy, which echoes the MoveOn talking points, or vice versa (fifth quote):

"Rather than selecting a nominee for the good of the nation and the court, President Bush has picked a nominee whom [sic] he hopes will stop the massive hemorrhaging of support on his right wing. This is a nomination based on weakness, not strength."

In keeping with tradition, Mary Jo Kopechne is not expected to take a position on the Alito nomination.

The campaign against Bork was successful because Democrats had a Senate majority at the time, and because Bork, though a delightful character, has a gruff public demeanor and unusual looks, making him easy to demonize. That simply won't work with Alito, who by all accounts is as mild-mannered as Chief Justice John Roberts. It is the Ted Kennedys, Chuck Schumers and Joe Bidens who look like out-of-the-mainstream lunatics. As John Podhoretz notes:

All and sundry understand that any judicial candidate with a record of any kind is going to be the object of a smear campaign.

As a result, the smears are almost instantly discounted. They aren't going to convince anyone; they're just an automatic and instantly forgettable aspect of our national political life, like balloons on election night or David Gergen's opinion on anything.

David who?

I'm Deeply Alarmed! Oh Wait, No I'm Not!

"The key thing to remember about Bush's nominees: they are all completely craven with respect to the executive's powers in wartime. And wartime is now defined as: for ever. In my view, the real upshot of the Court's shift under Bush may well be not in terms of the usual culture-war battles, but in terms of unrestricted executive power--to detain without charge, to cover up its own actions, and to torture. To do that, you have to get the Court out of the way. That's what Cheney is doing; and what Roberts and Alito will support."--Andrew Sullivan, Oct. 31

"I have to say that after a day of digesting Alito's record and rulings, I'm inclined toward him. He's obviously qualified, he has the right temperament, and his support of states' rights and the First Amendment are appealing. We should all wait for the hearings before we make up our minds. But I cannot say I'm deeply alarmed."--Andrew Sullivan, Nov. 1

You Don't Say
"Alito Could Be Vote on Abortion Cases"--headline, Associated Press, Nov. 1

Notable and Unquota-ble
We must say, we've come around to the view of our erstwhile colleague Heather Mac Donald, who argued in the Los Angeles Times Friday against choosing a woman to replace Justice O'Connor. It's not that we have anything against women on the court; our favorite nominee (maybe to replace John Paul Stevens?) is Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit. But there's something to be said for ditching the whole idea of "diversity" and making an appointment strictly on the merits.

Back in 1989 or 1990, when Clarence Thomas was up for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, we observed in a conversation with a former high-level Reagan official that Thomas might be a good choice to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was getting a little long in the tooth. Our interlocutor, who had been heavily involved in the judicial selection process, argued that it would be better if Thomas replaced a justice other than Marshall so that he wouldn't be seen as filling a racial quota. We were persuaded; apparently the first President Bush was not.

Sam Alito not only is a white male; he will be the fifth Catholic and the second Italian-American on the court. Thus his appointment flies in the face of any notion of minimum or maximum quotas by race, ethnicity, sex or religion.

One advantage of appointing a minority, of course, is that it underscores the racism at the heart of contemporary American liberalism. (Example: An editorial in yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel suggests that black people should all think alike: "The court with Alito would feature seven white men, one white woman and a black man, who deserves an asterisk because he arguably does not represent the views of mainstream black America.")

But it turns out that even though Alito is white, the left is putting its bigotry on display. The National Italian American Foundation put out a statement yesterday:

The NIAF is distressed by the attempts of some senators and the media (CNN, CBS) to marginalize Judge Samuel Alito's outstanding record, by frequent reference to his Italian heritage and by the use of the nickname, "Scalito." Appropriately, no one mentioned that Justice Breyer was Jewish or suggested that he was lock-step ideologically with the other Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it would have been outrageous to do so. We still do not know [Chief] Justice Robert's [sic] ethnicity.

Tim Chapman notes that a Democratic National Committee memo has, as the first in a list of ostensible Alito failings, "Alito Embarrassed Government by Failing to Obtain Crucial Mafia Conviction." And on the Angry Left Daily Kos Web site, someone called "Hunter," who claims to be Italian-American even though his name ends in a consonant, has an obscene rant against Alito:

I will be [profanity] [obscenity] Dead And In a Hole In The [obscenity] Ground before I let you claim "Italian American" OR Roman Catholic as a [obscenity] code phrase for [scatalogical vulgarity] conservative reactionaries whose dismissal of womens' [sic] rights, civil rights, worker rights, and pretty much everything else that has made America great make it clear they think all those things are akin to something they would normally scrape off their shoes.

ScrappleFace.com, meanwhile, "reports":

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, today questioned Judge Samuel Alito's commitment to diversity noting that the Supreme Court nominee's last name is 60 percent vowels and only 40 percent consonants.

In perhaps the most substantive critique of President George Bush's nominee to date, the senator also noted that the federal appeals court judge's full name contains every vowel, but a disproportionately small percentage of consonants.

"Not only is Judge Alito's name too vowel-heavy for mainstream Americans," said Sen. Schumer. "But 'Alito' begins and ends with vowels, suggesting that vowels are the alpha and omega of the alphabet, and clearly denigrating the contribution of consonants to our society."

Don't worry, though, this is facetious.

Joe Wilson's 'Secret' Wife
As we noted yesterday, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby does not allege that Valerie Plame, the long-suffering wife of Bush-hating egomaniac Joe Wilson, was a covert CIA agent. It does, however, claim that Plame's "employment status was classified" and that before July 14, 2003, when her name appeared in a column by Robert Novak, her "affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community."

We guess that depends what you mean by "common." It seems that at least two journalists knew that Plame worked for the CIA long before the kerfuffle that bears her name was a gleam in the eye of Angry Leftists. From the New York Sun, July 6, 2005:

Among the letters submitted by [Time's Matt] Cooper [to the judge considering whether to compel his testimony] was one from a former Time White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey. "In this case it seems to me the protection of a source transcends the other considerations,which do not seem to threaten national security," he wrote.

Mr. Sidey said in an interview that the identity of the CIA operative, Ms. Plame, was widely known--well before Mr. Cooper talked to his sources. "You know this game as well as I do," Mr. Sidey said. "That name was knocking around in the sub rosa world we live in for a long time."

And this is an exchange between host Alan Murray and guest Andrea Mitchell on CNBC's now-defunct "Capital Report," Oct. 3, 2003 (transcript not available publicly online):

Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.

In fact, Novak did not report that she was covert; Fitzgerald did not allege it; and the factual assertions Joe Wilson makes in his own book, if accurate, prove that she was not. It's further evidence that this "scandal" is about nothing, and that Libby's indictment--even if he turns out to be guilty--is a tragedy.

What Would Guantanamo Inmates Do Without Experts?
"Experts Want Access to Guantanamo Inmates"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 31

What Would We Do Without Woody Allen?
"Woody Allen: I've Gained No Wisdom"--headline, CNN.com, Nov. 1

'Action,' Indeed!
"Cabinet Wants More Czech Babies: Experts welcome new family policy, say more action needed"--headline, Prague Post, Oct. 26

Tough Break, Pebbles
"Wilma Limits Trick-or-Treating in Fla."--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 31

Where's the Rest of Her?
"Father Accused of Breaking Daughter's Leg Out of Jail"--headline,

He Might as Well Have Gone to a Mechanic
"Man Robbed While Working on His Vehicle"--headline, Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, Oct. 31

Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?
"Pope John Paul's 1975 Ford Sold for $690,000 at Auction"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 31

Yeah, Man, Total Bummer
"Aust Prepared for Bird Flu Outbreak: Downer"--headline, Australian Broadcast Corp. Web site, Nov. 1

Thanks for the Tip!--IX
"Health Tip: Winter Is Coming"--headline, HealthDayNews, Oct. 28

Better Than Stitches?
"Chewing Gum Speeds Surgery Recovery"--headline, HealthDayNews, Oct. 27

The Plutonium Diet Doesn't Work
"Finland Stomachs Nuclear Growth"--headline, Financial Times, Oct. 31

Bottom Story of the Month
"At least 81% of Americans are 'not remotely interested' in the visit by Prince Charles and his new wife Camilla," reports Sky News. Prince Charles apparently is the ex-husband of Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris some years back. Apparently some people (though not we) were remotely interested in her. More scintillating details about the Charles ennui:

The crowds are by no means queuing to roll out the welcome mats. The US media have largely ignored the impending Royal tour, writing off its itinerary as worthy and dull. . . . An article reprinted in several US newspapers advised Americans to "be nice." . . . Unlike 20 years ago, the royal pair will not grace the covers of the best-selling glossy weeklies--there are far more pressing priorities.

We'd point out that no one cares that no one cares about Prince Charles, but who cares?

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Derek Veit, Ruth Papazian, Michael Segal, Jim Orheim, Allen O'Donnell, M. Gilbertson, Ethel Fenig, Steve Eggleston, Peter Strnad, John Kurowski, Dave Kansas, Ron Ackert, Ed Lasky, Frank Russo, Cliff May, Dan O'Shea, Daniel Foty, Diana Nottingham, Michael Benn, Mark Cordeniz, Kelsey Ludford, Dennis Powell, Phil Hord, Joe Schueler and John Williamson. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: The Fed nominee inherits his own inflation revival.
• Brendan Miniter: Can President Bush recover from his awful year?
• Jonathan Adler: Alito isn't "pro-life" or "pro-choice" but "pro-law."