January 13, 2006
Have You No Sense of Decency?
By Thomas Lifson
Most Americans
were not glued to their televisions yesterday watching the Alito
confirmation hearings. But today a substantial portion of the
electorate is aware that Judge Alito’s wife Martha-Ann Bomgardner
was driven to tears, as Senator Lindsey Graham apologized to the
nominee and his family for the hectoring and smearing he and they
had endured.
It was one
of those moments which encapsulate a complex drama, speaking to
common (and noble) human emotions. Anyone who has ever stoically
attempted to control the deep pain of seeing a loved one suffering
or under stress knows that the merest expression of sympathy is
enough to burst the dam, and let the cathartic rears flow.
All of us
who love, who have watched our loved ones under duress, and who
have received support understand Martha-Ann Bomgardner, even if
the subtleties of the theory of the unitary executive and stare
decisis elude us.
The network
news honchos, for all their liberal bias, know that “If
it bleeds it leads,” and in this case, “If it cries,
it flies.”
The Judiciary
Committee Democrats have disgraced themselves.
The Associated
Press, once esteemed for its even-handed reporting, put out
a dispatch which implied
that Senator Graham was the one who abused the judge, triggering
the outburst. That the AP would attempt such a violation
of common sense betrays the desperation of the media branch of
the Democratic Party. It won’t fly because it does not ring
true to common experience.
The last
time such an obvious disgrace took place in a Senate hearing was
almost 52 years ago, in the Army-McCarthy hearings, when Joseph
Welch, a Boston lawyer, gained immortality with his rebuke
of Senator Joseph McCarty, for his abusive behavior toward a young
lawyer, Fred Fisher. Fisher was working with Welch, and had once
been a member of the Lawyers Guild, a leftist organization which
McCarthy tarred as suspiciously communist.
Two of Welch’s
phrases have been figuratively engraved in marble, lending the
neologism “McCarthyism” its flavor of extreme, unreasonable,
and mean persecution of people with guilt by association.
Senator,
I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness
[….]
You’ve
done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you left no sense of decency?
Half a century
later, history has repeated itself, this time not with words,
but with the moving sight of a wife reduced to tears by her husband’s
time on the witness table cross.
Senator Kennedy
is, if anything, an even less sympathetic figure than Joseph McCarthy.
While Kennedy’s brother may have been a martyr struck down
by an assassin, McCarthy never left a young woman to die in a
submerged car. The way in which Senator Kennedy has lived his
life disgraces whatever nobility might have adhered to him from
his brother’s end.
As I recently
wrote, most Americans do not pay attention to politics most
of the time, and form vague images of the two parties based on
accumulated fragmentary inputs. Because of media bias, most of
the time this process favors the Democrats.
Yesterday,
even those unconcerned by politics paid attention because
of the human drama. A new iconic incident has just entered our
political tradition. Political affiliation is both an intellectual
and an emotional matter. It requires a level of intellectualizing
beyond the capacity of most of us to affiliate oneself with a
repulsive waddling-fat bully.
It took the
GOP decades to recover from the damage inflicted by the lasting
imagery of McCarthy the bully. Anti-communism, fairly or not,
became stigmatized for a generation.
It was anti-racism
fanaticism, the attempt to tar Judge Alito as a bigot, which was
at the root of yesterday’s drama. If anything, the average
American today has more personal experience of being impugned
as a racist than the 1950s American had of being impugned as a
communist. Voters have far more to identify with in Alito than
they ever did in the McCarthy hearings.
The only
question now is how long it will take the Democrats to understand
the disaster they have created for themselves.
Thomas
Lifson is the editor and publisher of The
American Thinker.
