According to ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper on his blog DownAndDirty, the article from the CAP publication Prospect that Senator Kennedy tried to use to obtain a “gotcha” moment with Judge Alito was a piece of satire:
The 1983 essay “In Defense of Elitism” by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic…”The essay may not have been funny, D’Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.
Too funny.
Also of note:
Moreover, despite Alito’s job application, D’Souza says there was no actual “membership” in CAP; there were financial supporters and people who subscribed to Prospect, but no official organization per se.
Sounds like Alito was basically resume-padding.
h/t: Andrew Sullivan, who wasn’t especially impressed with Senator Kennedy’s performance, shall we say.
For that matter, neither was the Economist:
TED KENNEDY is deeply troubled by the ethics of the Supreme Court nominee. Between 2001 and 2006, Samuel Alito, who is currently an appeals court judge, accepted $7,684,423 in “donations” from special interests who perhaps wanted the law tweaked in their favour. That included $28,000 from defence contractors, $42,200 from drug firms and a whopping $745,373 from lawyers and law firms.Sphere: Related ContentNo, wait. Those are Senator Kennedy’s conflicts of interest—or, rather, a brief excerpt from a long list compiled by the Centre for Responsive Politics. The lapse for which the senator berated Mr Alito was considerably less clear-cut.
January 13th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
“Sounds like Alito was basically resume-padding.”
You mean he was lying. Great characteristic for a judge.
January 14th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Lame attempt at humor? Sure. Satire? Nah. It obviously shouldn’t be read so literally, but if it were a satire, we’d expect CAP to be for the integration of dining clubs (and obviously so: the kick of satire comes from the disjunction between the actual author and the dramatis persona).