If memory serves...

Pat Robertson said the terrorist attacks of 2001 were God's punishment on this nation for tolerating gays, feminists, and non-believers who have sex outside of wedlock. Then, later, he says the United States should "take out" a duly elected president of another sovereign nation. Then he pronounces the "good citizens" of Dover, PA under God's wrath because they believe in a quaint notion called separation of church and state from an outdated document called The Constitution, and expressed that belief by voting out the religious right school board that believed religious dogma should be taught as science.

Now, in a statement that I must admit surprised me given how much air (hot air) the 700 Club has given to Israel's troubles over the last two decades, Rev. Pat says that Prime Minster Sharon is under God's judgement for "dividing God's land", whatever that means.

Now that Pat Robertson is a certified whack job, everyone pretty much gets. The pattern is clear for all to see. What I don't get is how it is that God, who is omnipresent needs to get territorial about any particular place.

This radical from New Jersey has skillfully dodged questions of executive power asked from both sides of the table, given a nod to precedent on Roe v. Wade, disavowed membership in a radical right wing group in college, and acted like all the things he wrote are the work of some evil twin bearing his name. It's the same old stupid game. The Republicans soft toss questions and the Democrats are effectively forbidden from going for the jugular and getting at some semblance of the truth. It's a wasted exercise, these hearings. I thought Arlen Specter was a fair minded Republican, but so far, he's handed Bush and Co victory after victory. It's going to take another retiring justice and another president to tip the scales back to the point where it all makes sense again. If this is how Senate Democrats are going to exercise their clout with an unpopular lame duck president, then they deserve to be voted out along with these criminals,er, Republicans. The greatest evil is committed when good men do nothing.

I've watched several portions of the Alito hearings this week and have finally figured out what Judge Alito is that makes liberals and progressives so annoyed. He is exactly what the Bushies hypocritically call a "strict constuctionist". For this judge, with whom his colleagues have disagreed, it is about the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, not the real world implications of the law. I have seen this narrow view of the law and the Constitution come back to bite conservatives in the ass as in the Texas sodomy case, and more recently, in the Dover Intelligent Design case where the judge in the case was a Bush 2 appointee. Judge Alito is narrower even than Justice Scalia, and I think that's what makes him a potentially dangerous addition to the Supreme Court.

Justice Scalia is an unapologetic ideologue, Chief Justice Roberts seems to me conservative, but fair-minded and without a particularly partisan agenda. Alito seems to me to have an agenda, which is to interpret the law and the Constitution as narrowly and as literally as possible. The best we can hope for is that if he is confirmed, if the Democrats don't have the will to stop this confirmation, Alito will end up on the dissenting end of many of the Roberts' court rulings, thereby consigning him to judicial irrelevance. We can only hope that Scalia himself retires and is replaced by someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

While I'm on this I'd like to ask a bigger question: why are we as Americans more and more ready to have divisive moral issues decided by the Supreme Court anyway? If the court were in fact, impartial and independent, wouldn't it just refuse to hear cases that are going to produce no real solutions anyway? Isn't this a case of the Religious Right trying to use the legal system to enforce their own brand of "moralism", and is not the Court, by taking that bait tarnishing its reputation for independence? Further, the Religous Right says it has God on their side. If that's true, why do they need the courts or the law? Isn't their "God" enough?

Just asking.