Just Gimme Some Truth (or Not)

I've been catching up on my reading of other blogs today rather than contributing new posts to my own, and in a few minutes I'm off to see a show. But it's Sunday again, so that means Frank Rich has another column. Today he's examining truth and its relevance--or lack thereof--to current events. (As you've probably noticed on your own, the truth really has very little to do with anything these days.) He nails Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats for dropping the ball on the Alito hearings.

Once Judge Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats decided to counter the Republicans’ story by coming up with a fictional story of their own, or that’s what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their fictional biography cast Judge Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major evidence cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in reaction to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan Justice Department.

Judge Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the R.O.T.C. on campus, adding that he did not remember having “done anything substantial in relation to this group, including renewing my membership.” The Democrats plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy’s insistence that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP’s “repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay pronouncements.” In one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation process – a “Sunshine Boys”-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen Specter – Mr. Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP “documents in the possession of the Library of Congress” to hunt down Judge Alito’s bigotry.

There was only one problem with the Democrats’ fictional story line: it had been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Mr. Kennedy presented it to the nation. Mr. Kirkpatrick reported that he had examined the same papers Mr. Kennedy was threatening to subpoena – as well as some others at Princeton’s own library – and found no trace of Judge Alito’s involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a major donor. When the Senate committee did Mr. Kennedy’s bidding and looked at those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November, calling the senator’s bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had for keeping Judge Alito off the court. It says everything about the Democrats’ ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.

We're getting today's column from True Blue Liberal. It'll be the last such column for a while, as Rich "will be on a book leave, writing nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions." He says he'll be back in the spring.