I believe I know a few Vietnam veterans who saw active combat during the war who would have quite a different viewpoint regarding that statement, as well as a few POW’s who had to listen to said comments replayed to them by tape during their “sessions.”

Oh, and can I add: what is up with Biden and the Princeton hat? He bloviates without purpose, comes out and says, essentially, I won’t vote for him (Alito), and decries the process as useless, and then he puts on the hat, playfully? What a dickhead! In my business they call that Grin F*&#ing, which ain’t a good thing.

Princeton, which had always been a fairly conservative place, was torn apart. On the one hand, Pink Floyd played at McCarter Theater – on the other, the white shoe Wall Street types would come every year for the annual P-Rade. CAP was a group of students and alumni who were on the conservative side of the culture wars of the day. Princeton had recently gone co-ed, and there was some backlash against that. However, it was basically an innocuous group which gathered in the eating clubs to drink gin and tonics and talk about how great things were in the good old days.

To try to make Alito into some kind of Luddite because of CAP is just ludicrous. It’s as silly as digging up John Kerry quotes from when he was at Viet Vets Against the War and insisting that what you say at 25 is somehow relevant to what you believe at 55. George Bush got a free pass for saying that when he was young and stupid, he did things which were young and stupid. Alito deserves the same.

It’s time to start looking at what controversial cases (especially 5-4 cases with O’Connor, Souter, Stevens, Breyer and Ginsberg as the five) would turn out differently with Alito on the bench…

From memory, the big one seems to be the pair of Michigan affirmative action cases, where O’Connor split the baby in half. I’m fairly shocked that we haven’t heard this discussed in the context of C.A.P. yet. It was never credible that Justice Alito would be voting to overturn Plessy or Brown v Board of Ed. but Grutter v. Bollinger?

I’m not a lawyer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think President Bush just wiped out race-based college admissions.

I think if Bush had come into office with a similar dynamic at work, he would’ve been reined in as well from some of his more obvious overreaches.

I think one of the reasons that the founders did things the way they did is to make decision making intentionally slow. It takes (and should take) a long time to make decisions. That way, temporary majorities are marginalized. That is why court appointments are lifetime deals – so that that they aren’t affected by swings in majority opinions. The founders were terrified by majorities, and so am I.

The confirmation process should be personal because I want to know what I’m getting. Once they’re in it is almost impossible to get rid of them.

If you look carefully, that’s what a majority party is supposed to be doing. Democracy is not a classroom exercise, and the country is not effectively governed by pluralities.

If the Dems don’t like it, for goodness sake, they need to start finding electable candidates and getting majorities in the House and Senate.