I’m sorry that Martha Alito was driven to tears, but her honest reaction to the way her husband was being treated cast into stark relief what Canadian writer David Warren calls the “decency deficit” of the bullies:


“While it has been a subject for exuberant mockery among some liberal Democrats, I was appalled, this week, to learn that Martha-Ann Alito, wife of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee, was driven in tears from his Senate confirmation hearing. She had been listening to senators such as Ted Kennedy accuse her husband of concealing the most ghastly and extraordinary views — of being a closet racial and misogynist bigot — on the basis of some ridiculously fluffy guilt-by-association. When a Republican senator was reduced to clarifying that Sam Alito was not a bigot, Mrs Alito could take no more. She had soon composed herself, however, and returned to sit by her husband’s side.


“Now, Ted Kennedy is a special case — a man whose own sense of decency was established when he left a young woman to drown, after driving his car off a dike bridge at Chappaquiddick, and spent the rest of a long night with his cronies, trying to figure how to spin it with the police and the press, rather than reporting what had happened. We discover what a man is, when we see how he acts in desperation.”


Oh, and the nefarious Concerned Alumni of Princeton that so concerned Senator Kennedy-Weekly Standard Publisher Terry Eastland, who worked for CAR, takes you “Inside ‘Concerned Alumni for Princeton,'” and gives you the real skinny on the organization. (It wasn’t exclusive like Harvard’s Owl Club, to which Senator Kennedy recently renewed his membership. Oh, wait–Kennedy has just announced plans to quit the Owl Club “as fast as I can.”)