THE SHREWD RHETORIC OF ALITO AND BUSH.

[norml]

THE SHREWD RHETORIC OF ALITO AND BUSH.
Hint, Hint
by David Kusnet


he nomination of Judge Samuel Alito raises three questions concerning rhetoric: How will Bush sell his nominee? How will Alito sell himself? And how will liberals make the case against him? Today's opening round of speeches and statements suggests that Republicans are off to a smarter start than Democrats.

Let's start with Bush. In picking Alito, Bush faces the same challenge he's confronted since he started his first presidential campaign: How can he appeal to his conservative base without antagonizing the rest of the country? This is no easy task even under the best of circumstances; and with conservatives having torpedoed his previous nominee, a federal grand jury having indicted his vice president's chief of staff, and his approval ratings having slipped to 39 percent, Bush will have a harder time than ever pulling off his usual technique: addressing the nation directly while making coded appeals to his core constituency.

As he showed yesterday morning, however, he's still going to try. First, he made clear what all sides of the political spectrum wanted to hear: that his new nominee is qualified for the job. Short of explicitly comparing Alito with the hapless Harriet Miers, Bush couldn't have been more forceful on this point. He said that Alito has an "extraordinary breadth of experience." Then, he added that his new nominee has "more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more than 70 years." Somewhere, Miers was wondering if she could have her mash notes to Bush returned.

But while experience is something almost everyone wants in a Supreme Court justice, reliably right-wing views appeal only to a committed minority of Americans--the very people who turned out so heavily for Bush last year but whose support he needs now that he's in trouble. So Bush appealed to his hardcore constituents by speaking in code. Twice, he called Alito "principled"--a word he'd never used to describe Roberts or Miers in his statements nominating them. And, in a shrewd but revealing turn of phrase, he called Alito "tough and fair." A liberal would have been more likely to call a former prosecutor who became a federal judge "tough but fair." By implying that toughness and fairness go together, Bush was sending a message to social conservatives that he and Alito share their understanding of how the world works.


snip


http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w051031&s=kusnet110105

[Erika]

1. The guy is a white male Catholic who is against abortion

and against the majority of American women. Too bad W denied diversity and a woman on the Court. The right wing fringe don't like women speaking unless they take a subservient role.

[kurth]

2. Right-wing code is tiresome

Principled = a self-righteous ideologue
Tough But Fair = he'll rob ya blind but he'll give you 5 cents back
Strict Constructionist = privacy right doesn't exist - ignore the 9th Amendment
Qualified = he'll do what we say; well trained; won't shit in the house