Desperate Fishwives

The Dems were certainly coarse and abusive -- that's the definition of "fishwife," a coarse and abusive woman -- during Judge Alito's hearing.

I was driving a lot today and got to listen to C-Span on my nifty new satellite radio. I missed the portion that drove Mrs. Alito out of the chambers in tears, but found Teddy to be astonishingly (even for him) desperate and inexcusably rude.

His run at Alito on the judge's membership in Conservative Alumni of Princeton (CAP) was about as thin-iced and coldblooded an assault as I've ever seen. To attempt to paint Alito as a racist misogynist based on articles authored by others in the CAP magazine shows that the Dems are basically without an issue.

They can't find any Alito decisions, speeches or articles that show Alito to be anything but an honorable man and exceptional judge, so they are grasping at smoke -- articles written by someone else, disclaimed by the magazine, from an organization Alito says he doesn't remember much of anything about.

They attack him for not remembering. Alito and I are the same age. In 1985, I can remember being a member of two organizations, but I'm sure I was a member of others. Whatever they might have been, I certainly don't remember why I joined them. The two I do remember were a Chamber of Commerce and a professional association, which published two magazines. I frequently disagreed with the positions stated by authors in those magazines.

Kennedy probably can't remember 1985 without staff assistance, yet he was reduced to trying to shout down the committee chair, demanding an immediate executive session to vote on a subpoena so CAP records could be scrutinized.

To sink as low as these desperate Dems, you'd have to be very coarse and abusive ... like a fishwife.