Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Scalito
Is not a racist term. Give me a break. Hunter at Kos gets it right:
Sullivan basically concurs.
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Same crap, different week. Yesterday brought us the sight of Drudge heavily pushing the feces-laden smear that Democrats were aligning against Alito because he was an Italian American. We then got to see MSNBC's Chris Matthews pick up the smear and run with it, waving a "discovered" Democratic memo that he wouldn't bother to actually show anyone but which, we were assured, contained a "disgusting" attack on Alito's ethnicity.
Only one problem. As it turns out, the whole thing was a crude Swift Boat style attack on Democrats that was apparently orchestrated by reliable Republican A. Kenneth Ciongoli, crassly distributing his bigotry-baiting claim under the auspices of the National Italian American Foundation. Oh, and he's hardly a disinterested party -- his son, as it turns out, clerked for Alito.
So within the span of half a day, an attack was manufactured, distributed to reliable Republican sources, and placed on MSNBC, which treated it as something they had themselves "discovered". And within that same half a day, it was tracked back from MSNBC to its original Republican source.
The name "Scalito"? Hardly an "attack" on Italian Americans like myself -- it's a nickname that has been used by legal observers, friend and foe alike, to describe Alito's distinctly Scalia-like, far right judicial philosophies. And those legal observers have been using it for, at bare minimum, the last two years.
Sullivan basically concurs.
