Some nice e-letters about our coverage of the Alito hearings (nice to know that since the Dems took their rope and hanged themselves, we won’t have to blog much about them anymore):
From R.Z.:
“As someone, who like Judge Alito, was a grateful Ivy League scholarship recipient and who spent his summers breaking bread with more African Americans and Hispanics in our working-class summer jobs than Sen. [Ted, of course] Kennedy did at his Hyannis compound or during sojourns in Europe, I offer the following:
“Is it the goal of the Democratic Party and Sen. Kenneedy to make every single person who rose from a less than exalted beginning hate them with a true passion? Is it their goal to have every Italian-American hate them? The spectacle of a preppy all-male final club Harvard grad grilling one of us — the scholarship public school student without a lot of sophistication but with a zeal for ‘the books’ — made me feel that I was in the chair with him.
” If one of us had behaved like Sens. Kennedy and [Sen. Charles] Schumer in public while we were children, we would have been justly spanked. Anger however, transitioned to sadness, when I reflected upon the transition from only a generation ago: liberals had [Hubert] Humphrey, [Eugene McCarthy] and Stevenson, to name just a few. While one may have disagreed with them, these guys had real class and took courageous stands. The current crowd is nothing but white trash.”
Well said, R.Z. I, too, lament the passing of classy, principled Democrats. There are a few still left–Sen. Joe Lieberman comes to mind–but you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
And from R.B.:
“I’ve gotten the feeling numerous times during these confirmation hearings, that senators on the left wouldn’t be satisfied with a Supreme Court justice who was any less a gender feminist activist than Ruth Bader Ginsberg….
” I was watching today’s session on CSPAN. At the end of today’s session Sen. Kennedy turned to Sen. [Arlen] Specter and said words to the effect that he’d like to have a couple of letters inserted into the record at an appropriate time. Sen. Specter basically said he would do that. One of the letters, Sen Kennedy said, was from the National Association of Women’s Lawyers. Here is something I found on their website that I suspect parallels what will be conveyed in that letter:
“‘The National Association of Women Lawyers’…Committee for the Evaluation of Supreme Court Nominees, has evaluated Judge Samuel Alito for the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Committee has determined that Judge Alito is not qualified to serve on the Court from the perspective of laws and decisions regarding women’s rights or that have a special impact on women. NAWL’s rating of not qualified from a women’s rights perspective is the result of its evaluation of Judge Alito’s writings, including his judicial record. On those women’s rights issues that he has addressed, Judge Alito has shown a disinclination to protect or advance women’s rights.’
“What gives the National Association of Women’s Lawyers the audacity to ‘assume’ that they speak for all women, or even the majority of women, when apparently their views represent only a fringe group of radical, gender feminists who are clearly out of the mainstream? It appears to me that rich, privileged, women in America’s gender feminist fringe are a little hypocritical to be alleging (pretending) to understand the motivations of mainstream American women.”
R.B., the claim of elite feminista groups like the National Association of Women lawyers to speak for all American women is exactly the reason that we, the Independent Women’s Forum, came into existence. We’re glad that you and many other Americans (including, for example, the Concerned Women for America, can see through these these hothouse groups of privileged upper-middle-class women who pretend to speak for our sex.