Could Morris Bender have diagnosed what's wrong with "Sammy the Hammer" Alito?

It's a shame he already has the nickname Sammy the Hammer. Otherwise we just might want to go with Smilin' Sammy.

by Ken

The other day, in recalling how the five right-wing thugs on the Supreme Court made their way there, Howie made passing reference to what the Washington Post's Dana Milbank in his Tuesday column called "Justice Samuel Alito's middle-school antics."

I think this requires a little more attention. Not that there's anything we can do about it short of impeachment, which of course isn't going to happen. Still, the more exposure we get to the mind as well as the manners of Sammy the Hammer, the more he's coming to seem to me as utterly useless a pile of protoplasm as our beloved Justice Clarence Thomas.

Dana has now logged a lot of years in our nation's capital as a reporter rather than a thumb-sucker, meaning that he has spent a lot of time observing the local fauna at close-up range, and he is now emerging as a singularly valuable guide to behaviors that go beyond the range of "Washington normal." Early this year, for example, I admired the important distinction he drew in a column called "A House radical is now in the meanstream." He was writing about the return to Congress of Texas wacko Steve Stockman, having discovered that the loony GOP representative who was threatening President Obama with impeachment if he used an executive order on guns was a loon he remembered vividly from a memorably loony single House term in the '90s, swept into office in the Republican tide of 1994.

However, Dana wrote, there's an important difference. Back then, "he proved too much even for the '94 revolutionaries; his classmates came to shun him and voters in his competitive district sent him packing." No more: "His views, outlandish in the House of 1995, are more at home in the House of 2013." For example, Stockman had just been "one of 179 House Republicans to vote against aid to Hurricane Sandy's victims." The vintage-2013 Steve Stockman "can still bring the crazy," Dana concluded. "The problem is he's now just one of many purveyors."

DANA TARGETS "SAMMY THE HAMMER"

"The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court's opinions announced Monday," Dana wrote in his Tuesday column this week, "was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did."

The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn't stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg's left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words -- and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.

This was not unique behavior for the Hammer, Dana wrote.

Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was "possibly not" the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled -- and Alito, seated at Kagan's right elbow, glowered.

Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that "every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption' today." Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.

Nor is the Hammer's disdain exculsively reserved for female Supreme Court justices.

Alito is best known for his antics at the 2010 State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Citizens Uniteddecision. While other justices remained expressionless, Alito adopted a sour look, shook his head "no" and appeared to mouth the words "not true." At the various oral arguments I've watched over the past few years, Alito's eye-rolling, head-shaking and other expressions of exasperation are a fairly common occurrence, most often when Sotomayor has the floor.

On the day in question, Dana points out, the most dramatic business was the High Court's "unexpectedly modest decision on affirmative action," a rare demonstration of judicial "comity."

Beyond the broad agreement on affirmative action, though, were three 5-4 decisions Monday, two read by Alito with a dry and clinical delivery. In the first, he announced that the court was rejecting a jury award for a woman who was disfigured and disabled by a drug that didn't come with adequate warnings. Despite the "dreadful injuries," Alito argued, siding with the drugmaker and throwing out an appellate-court ruling, "sympathy for respondent does not relieve us of the responsibility of following the law."

The second case Alito read, one of two cases Monday limiting claims of workplace discrimination, rejected an African American woman's complaints of a racially hostile work environment. Alito argued that the employer was not liable because, under Alito's narrowed definition, the person doing the harassing did not qualify as the employee's supervisor.

Dana goes on to differentiate the Hammer's loutishness with some of his conservative colleagues' less antagonistic ways of expressing themselves.

* "Antonin Scalia is caustic and even incendiary, but often funny."

* "Chief Justice John Roberts can be droll."

And "on the other side":

* [Elena] Kagan has tried to make the court more accessible to a lay audience by giving chatty lectures from the bench rather than reading from her written opinions, which also have been playful. . . ."

* Even [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, no comedienne, can be colloquial and accessible. In her dissents Monday, she noted that an employee can avoid a harassing co-worker by telling him to 'buzz off,' and she argued that 'the ball again lies in Congress's court to correct this court's wayward interpretations.' She also invoked the self-deprecating quotation defining a legal mind as one that "can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking about the thing which it is attached to.' Ginsburg was tart, even acidic -- but she confined her objections to words. That kind of judicial restraint would benefit her junior colleague."

But I don't think Sammy the Hammer's problem is merely lack of restraint. We've seen repeatedly the dark side of his life story, the way his brain seems to be hammered into unbendable, impenetrable orthodoxy by the romance of -- so he seems to think -- having lifted himself up by his bootstraps from an immigrant's son -- the story that played so heartfully during the confirmation hearings that whitewashed his lurking radicalism. Never mind that both his parents were teachers. That doesn't fit the romance so well. He seems to look at every situation that comes before him as if he's thinking: "I made it all on my own. Why shouldn't you?" (My guess, by the way, is that a closer look would show that our Sammy had a whole lot more help along the way than he seems to remember.)

In one of my favorite Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes, from the final season, "My Son, the Genius" (I looked it up, and see that it was written by series co-creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns along with one of the major MTM writers, Bob Ellison), there's a plot line that has Ted and Georgette Baxter at wit's end over their adopted son David's troubles in school. Then another plot line brings them into contact with the crankily geezerish father-in-law of one of Lou Grant's daughters, Morris Bender, played to infuriatingly geezerish perfection by that exquisite character actor Ned Glass (pictured here). Morris begins by announcing (this is just from memory; I haven't seen the episode in decades): "I'm an old man, and I've seen a thing or two," then proceeds to suggest that sometimes when a child fails in school, "there's a simple explanation, and it's so simple but nobody thinks of it." Yes? Everyone's listening to the wise old man. "Maybe," Morris says, "the kid is just stoo-pid."

In fact, the problem turned out to be the opposite. David was so bright that he was bored by school. But I wonder whether Morris hasn't unwittingly diagnosed Justice Sammy, now becoming known for both his smugly self-satisfied judicial inanities and his repulsively boorish behavior. Maybe, I'm suggesting, he's just stoo-pid.

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Maybe we won't have the Bachmann to kick around anymore, but is there any known cure for what E. J. Dionne Jr. calls "Bachmannism"?

"Bachmannism is far from finished. The Minnesota right-winger . . . perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media . . . .

"You don’t have to bat 1.000 or even .350 in this game. Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you've won.

"Bachmann's method is now common currency."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"GOP needs more Doles and fewer Bachmanns"

by Ken

I mentioned the other day that I thought something needed to be said about the Bachmann's announcement that we won't have it to kick around anymore. My first thought was that there are no winners here -- that the Bachmann having done so much to pollute the national political discourse, there is no remedy for or rescue from the damage it has done. You can't, to put it another way, merely shovel the doody into the cesspool.

Of course I was being naive. Of course there are winners: Republicans who no longer have to sweat out whether they need to inject an occasional word of demurral in response to the constant flow of fecal matter she dumped into the political ecosphere. Not that any of them are bothered by the "substance" of what she's had to say, which has consistently been innocent of even the slightest grain of truth or connection to reality, any more than any of them had any substantive problem with the psychotic blithering that came out of the mouths of GOP Senate candidates like the unspeakable Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

No, it's just that at a certain point the psychosis and delusion become so conspicuous as to be potentially embarrassing to such specimens' fellow party members. As Howie and I pointed out repeatedly, it's hard to find any position articulated by the likes of Akin and Mourdock that isn't also a core belief of a respected Republican like rising star Paul Ryan. Specimens like Ryan are just more skilled at soft-pedaling their delusions when speaking to nondelusional audiences.

Finally I had to go along with much of what Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank had to say about who won in his column on the subject. After noting that the Bachmann's announcement came 72 hours after Bob Dole's much-publicized interview with Fox Noisemaker Chris Wallace which included his proposal that Republicans put up a "closed for repairs" sign, he noted an "error" in her announcement, when she announced that "the mainstream liberal media" would "put a detrimental spin on my decision."
"Detrimental?" Dana wrote. "Um, no. It's hard to see the mothballing of Bachmann as anything but unalloyed good news, for the party and the country."

Certainly, the media and late-night TV hosts will greatly miss the woman who declared that the American Revolution began in Concord, N.H., instead of Concord, Mass.; that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation; that certain members of Congress are "anti-America"; that John Wayne came from her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa (she confused him with serial killer John Wayne Gacy); that God created an earthquake and a hurricane to protest federal spending; that the U.S. government is plotting death panels, re-education camps and an IRS database of Americans' medical records; and that the feds could use census data to put people in internment camps.

Whether she was calling President Obama a socialist, misplacing John Quincy Adams in history as a "Founding Father," or wishing Elvis Presley a "happy birthday" on the anniversary of his death, Bachmann frequently furnished evidence for her claim that God had called her to run for president -- if only to provide comic relief.

But for all her entertainment value, Bachmann has done more than any other elected official to inject false information into the national debate, contributing to a culture in which many conservatives detach themselves from reality. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs this week based on data from PolitiFact.com found that Republicans' claims in recent months are three times more likely to be false than those of Democrats. The Post's fact checker, Glenn Kessler, discovered that Bachmann told a higher percentage of whoppers than any other lawmaker.

Dana also noted:

Bachmann also has been one of the most prominent practitioners of the obstinacy Dole was talking about in his interview with Chris Wallace. "It seems to be almost unreal that we can't get together on a budget or legislation," the elder statesman said. Arguing that even Ronald Reagan would be unwelcome in today's GOP, Dole warned that "the country is going to suffer" from the party's refusal to compromise.

The one point in Dana's column I'm not so sure about is that "voters appear to be tiring of this approach." I think his Post colleague E. J. Dionne Jr. got it right when he wrote:

On the surface, Republicans will be happy that they won't have to answer for her exquisitely inflammatory statements anymore. Democrats will be disappointed to lose a face that launched thousands of contributions their way. You might say her departure is a small repair for the GOP's image.

In fact, Bachmannism is far from finished. The Minnesota right-winger deserves to be memorialized with an "ism" because she perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media -- if, at first, only in the form of "coverage" of what conservative radio shows, Web sites or Fox News are talking about.

You don’t have to bat 1.000 or even .350 in this game. Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you've won.

Bachmann's method is now common currency. And here’s the beautiful thing: Even as the regular media does some of your work for you, you lambaste the very same media. This only creates more pressure on them to cover you.

I think this is exactly right. The curse of the Bachmann isn't her own miserable existence, but the entrenched scourge of "Bachmannism," as E.J. puts it.

The Bachmann didn't, of course, invent the concept of political discourse that's all lies, all the time. The GOP had that strategy hammered in place well before the 2000 political season, which Young Johnny McCranky and the country's roster of GOP candidates got through without uttering a word of truth. And for decades now the GOP lie machine has been shadowed if not actually inspired by that bedrock of media lies, Fox Noise.

But the Bachmann made a steady diet of lies of the most outrageous and preposterous sort the basic medium of discourse for the "mainstream" of Republicanism, and perhaps for the media generally. "My nomination for the ultimate in Bachmannism," E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote, "was her slander against the program encouraging citizens to serve the nation and each other."

Opposing a bill to expand AmeriCorps, she warned that "there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums." Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is just around the corner.

Of course this was all made up in the demented mind of the Bachmann, with perhaps some reference to a kind of program that people of her political persuasion may dream of putting into effect against their enemies.

I have another nomination, which I more or less stumbled across. In fact, I almost read right through it.

My friend Paul put together and circulated a compendium of bizarreries from the Bachmann. It's the one that eventually led to its confusion of John Quincy Adams with his father, John Adams. "We also know," quoth the B, "that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." This is clearly some sort of grudging acknowledgment of the reality that the U.S. Constitution institutionalized slavery. No doubt people like the Bachmann, whose now sole criterion for "reality" is "does this make me feel better?," at the same time feel entitled to any ameliorative fake-reality they can concoct.

I mean, did you hear that? The "founders . . . worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." What??? Where would one begin to sort out the layers of lies and delusions so casually embedded therein.

"Bachmann's retirement," wrote E. J. Dionne Jr., "should foster some soul-searching about the nature of our political discourse and how easy it is for falsehood and innuendo to get treated as just one more element in the conversation -- no more or less legitimate than any other."

Yes, it should, E.J., but I'm not holding my breath.

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Ooh, that Hillary makes the doody-brainers so-o-o mad!!!

-- Christopher Weyant's New Yorker Daily Cartoon today

by Ken

"Whistleblower's yarn fails to tie Benghazi lapses to politics" is the head on the column the Washington Post's Dana Milbank offered regarding the much-ballyhooed "oversight" hearing promoted by House Republican master criminal Darrell Issa, starring Gregory Hicks, then our no. 2 diplomat in Libya, who who was going to blow the lid off the Obama White House's politicization of the awful night in Benghazi when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

But despite Issa's incautious promise that the hearing's revelations would be "damaging" to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hicks didn't lay a glove on the former secretary of state Wednesday. Rather, he held lawmakers from both parties rapt as he recounted the events of that terrifying night -- revealing a made-for-Hollywood plot with a slow, theatrical delivery and genuine emotion.

In Dana's retelling, Hicks's emerges as storytelling prowess was exceeded only by his apparently uncontrollable self-promotion.

Hicks, bald and with a white chin beard, said his "jaw dropped" when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice falsely claim on TV that there had been a protest at the Benghazi consulate, but he declined an invitation to challenge the veracity of the director of national intelligence, who said the statement reflected "our collective best judgment at the time."

Hicks said he thought a flyover by U.S. jets could have deterred the second of the two attacks that night, but he declined to question the judgment of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has said there was no way to get the fighters there in time.

Hicks was of little use to Republicans in their efforts to connect the lapses in the Benghazi response to Clinton or to the Obama White House. He said that he spoke to Clinton by phone at 2 a.m. that night and that she supported his actions. He undermined one of Issa's claims -- that Clinton had rejected an increase in security for the Libya facilities -- when he agreed that the secretary of state's name appears on all cables, even if she doesn't write them.

Hicks did have some damning things to say about the State Department trying to block him from cooperating with Issa's committee. But that wasn't quite the evidence Issa had promised: that politics drove the administration's response to Benghazi.

Never mind that there probably isn't a Republican in the House who could find Libya on a map, or who has any idea who in the country believed in what or whom or what effect any of it had on U.S. interests. And never mind that the Republican chumps intent on proving the Obama administration's dastardly "politicizing" of events in Libya spent eight years as silent as rocks while the Chimpy Bush regime devoted every second of every day to doing precisely this. Never mind anything. Let's just jump ugly on the effing Hillary. Didn't Hillary-hating used to be a crowd-pleasing political platform?

This is what happens when you have a political movement built on ideological hysteria without any actual ideology or real beliefs, just blinding hate informed by Tales Blown Out of Rush Limbaugh's Rectum of Darkness.

Republicans Hold Hearings About Hillary Clinton's Poll Numbers

Posted by Andy Borowitz


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- Republican lawmakers asked increasingly tough questions today as they held another day of hearings to investigate, in the words of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), "Hillary Clinton's suspiciously high poll numbers and what can be done to make them lower."

"With the help of Fox News, we have brutally attacked Hillary Clinton for months, and yet she remains more popular than ever," Rep. Issa said. "This committee needs to know how that happened, and how we can keep it from happening in the future."

Rep. Issa pointed to recent polls showing the former Secretary of State trouncing every potential G.O.P. Presidential candidate, "even a skinnier version of Chris Christie."

"We demand an answer to one simple question," he said. "What does Secretary Clinton know that none of us knows?"

In his boldest allegation of the day, Rep. Issa accused Secretary Clinton of "cynically using her post as Secretary of State to become wildly popular with the American people."

"I invite her to these hearings to answer those charges," he said.

Wrapping up for the day, Rep. Issa warned the former Secretary of State that he was just getting started: "Once we Republicans decide to investigate someone, we don't stop. If Secretary Clinton doesn't believe me, she should ask her husband."

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"The gun-lobby goons were at it again" (Dana Milbank)

By amazing coincidence, the "independent" report commissioned by the NRA, brandished here by old-school loon former Rep. "Itchy Asa" Hutchinson at Tuesday's big armed press conference, is solidly percent behind the its loony scheme to make the schools "safe" by filling them with armed goons. One difference: The "independent" task force wants those goons to be professionals, rejecting the vigilantes envisioned by the NRA.

"By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences -- and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower."

-- Dana Milbank, in his WaPo column yesterday,
"The NRA's disarming plan toarm schools"

"The purchase of Asa Hutchinson did not and will not prevent the N.R.A. from buying a single additional congressman in the future. Period."

-- the NRA's "Crazy Wayne" LaPierre, quoted in the Borowitz
Report "N.R.A. Defends Purchase of Former Congressman"

by Ken

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank surely knows how to set a scene. The scene in this case is the press conference at which "Call Me Crazy" Wayne LaPierre announced the National Rifle Association's uneagerly awaited plan for school insecurity, which is to turn the nation's schools into free-fire zones. Hey, as long as there are guns firing, Crazy Wayne is happy.

The quote in the post title is the opening line of Dana's column yesterday, "The NRA's disarming plan toarm schools." From there he proceeds to a reminder that the NRA's security guards "gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen."

The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its "National School Shield" -- the gun lobbyists' plan to get armed guards in public schools -- and this time they were packing heat.

About 20 of them -- roughly one for every three reporters -- fanned out through the National Press Club, some in uniforms with gun holsters exposed, others with earpieces and bulges under their suit jackets.

In a spectacle that officials at the National Press Club said they had never seen before, the NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters' briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.

The antics gave new meaning to the notion of disarming your critics.

By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences -- and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.

Thus has it gone so far in the gun debate in Washington. . . .

Dana seems unsurprised by the faded chances for any sort of meaningful congressional action to curb the gun craziness. The momentum is all going in the other direction. But then, we know who creates that momentum.

If the NRA has its way, as it usually does, states will soon be weakening their gun laws to allow more guns in schools. The top two recommendations Hutchinson announced Tuesday involved firearms in the schoolhouse. The first: "training programs" for "designated armed school personnel." The second: "adoption of model legislation by individual states to allow for armed school personnel."

Hutchinson claimed that his task force, which came up with these ideas, had "full independence" from the NRA. By coincidence, the proposals closely matched those announced by the NRA before it formed and funded the task force. The task force did scale back plans to protect schools with armed volunteer vigilantes, opting instead for arming paid guards and school staff -- at least one in every school. States and school districts "are prepared" to pay for it, Hutchinson declared.

The task force garnished the more-guns recommendations with some good ideas, such as better fencing, doors and security monitoring for schools, and more mental-health intervention. But much of that is in the overall Senate legislation that the NRA is trying to kill.

To close his case, Hutchinson introduced a secret weapon, "special guest" Mark Mattioli, the father of one of the Newtown, Conn., victims. Mattioli told reporters that there had been "nine school shootings since Newtown" but that Newtown was "off the bell curve, if you will, with respect to the impact."

Perhaps that's because the Newtown killer had a military-style gun with a 30-round magazine?

And if the NRA gets its way, says Dana, "American schoolchildren may grow accustomed to the sort of scene Hutchinson caused Tuesday, protected by more armed guards than a Third World dictator."

Hutchinson, pressed by reporters about the armed goons, said: "You go into a mall, there is security. And so there is security here at the National Press Club."

A reporter asked Hutchinson what he was afraid of.

"There's nothing I'm afraid of. I'm very wide open," Hutchinson replied, separated from his unarmed questioners by an eight-foot buffer zone, a lectern, a raised podium, a red-velvet rope and a score of gun-toting men. "There's nothing I'm nervous about."

SAY, WHO IS THIS ASA HUTCHINSON BOZO ANYWAYS?

For a bit of background, as well as some controversy regarding the NRA's new use of Itchy Asa as a front loon, we turn to the crack investigators at the Borowitz Report.

N.R.A. Defends Purchase of Former Congressman

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- The National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre today defended his decision to purchase the former congressman Asa Hutchinson, after an outspoken N.R.A. member complained that the organization should be using its funds to buy current congressmen only.

Shortly after Mr. Hutchinson appeared at a press conference in Washington to present the N.R.A.'s plan to arm teachers and other school personnel, N.R.A. dissident Tracy Klugian blasted the purchase of the former Arkansas representative.

"Members of the N.R.A. fork over millions of dollars to this organization," he said. "That money should be used to buy people who are actually in Congress now, not some has-been like Hutchinson who doesn't even have a vote anymore."

Mr. Klugian said that as he watched former Rep. Hutchinson at the podium, "It made my blood boil, especially when I thought about all of the current congressmen out there who are totally for sale."

Not long after Mr. Klugian made his comments, Mr. LaPierre pushed back: "The purchase of Asa Hutchinson did not and will not prevent the N.R.A. from buying a single additional congressman in the future. Period."

While refusing to divulge the purchase price for Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. LaPierre reassured the N.R.A. membership, "We got a very good deal on Asa. There wasn't exactly a bidding war."

In a separate statement, Mr. Hutchinson said, "A free and lively exchange of views is what makes the N.R.A. such a great organization -- and is why I'm so proud to be owned by it."

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