Immodest Proposal

Alan Dershowitz, like many liberals, was frustrated that Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats were unable to lay a glove on Samuel Alito in their questioning of the High Court nominee. Last week at Huffingtonpost.com, he meditated on the "lessons learned from the deeply flawed process," and offered a proposal.

The self-described "best-known criminal lawyer in the world," "top lawyer of last resort," and one of America's "most distinguished defenders of individual rights," suggested to the senators that they "should check their egos." Then they might realize that a superior way to question Supreme Court nominees like Alito would be to outsource the interrogation to trained professionals.

Specifically, Dershowitz--himself a first-rate appellate lawyer with a background in constitutional scholarship--urged Senate Judiciary Committee members to "bring in three or four first-rate trial lawyers with backgrounds in constitutional scholarship to ask the hard questions," adding, "of course Committee members will consult with the litigators to ensure that they cover all the issues of concern to the senators. But during the hearings, the senators' job will be to listen and then to vote." Sounds good to us, and we bet the senators will think so, too.

According to Dershowitz, "history provides instructive examples of committee lawyers helping conduct important Congressional hearings." He mentions Watergate, a good example. He also mentions the Iran-contra sessions, during which, if The Scrapbook recalls correctly, an obscure Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North was so humiliated and destroyed by the expert questioning of the Democrats' hired lawyer, John W. Nields Jr., that he crawled from the hearing stand a broken man, and was never heard from again.

So we're certain Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats will want to give serious consideration to Dershowitz's proposal, which he promises would finally "put substance before spectacle" in the committee hearings. After all, this isn't just some attention-seeking lawyer mouthing off on his blog. To the contrary, as he informs us in his Huffingtonpost.com bio, Dershowitz's "writing has been praised by Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, David Mamet, William Styron, Aharon Appelfeld, A.B. Yehoshua and Elie Wiesel. More than a million of his books have been sold worldwide, in numerous languages, and more than a million people have heard him lecture around the world."

To Know Him Is to Loathe Him

"The world's biggest political blogger" is how Benjamin Wallace-Wells describes Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Democratic consultant-on-the-make and proprietor of the popular lefty website dailykos.com, in the January/February Washington Monthly. Wallace-Wells may be right.

Through his website, Wallace-Wells reports, Moulitsas raised some $500,000 in the 2004 election cycle, which makes him "one of the party's top fund-raisers." Not long after that election, Moulitsas delivered a speech to Senate Democrats in which he explained why the party has done so badly. (Answer: They don't hate Republicans enough.) Since then, Moulitsas has held teleconferences every three weeks with Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Also on Moulitsas's speed dial: Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.

What sort of man do Democrats turn to for advice? Well, last Friday, January 20, Daily Kos was running a poll--"Who do you despise more?"--in which George Bush was running a respectable second behind Osama bin Laden, 58-41 percent. In April 2004, when an Iraqi mob flayed the bodies of four American contractors in Falluja, Moulitsas wrote on his site, "I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them." Over a year later, he has no regrets about his word choice. Quite the contrary: Moulitsas told Wallace-Wells that he feels "vindicated" when he looks back at that post.

Then there's Moulitsas's hatred for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council--he's written that he wants to "euthanize" it--which led to his declaration, last August 22, of an impending war he would launch within his party. The war never materialized. Moulitsas said it had been "deferred." But then, Moulitsas says a lot of things. Speaking with him, Wallace-Wells writes,

like reading his blog, is a singularly withering experience. He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don't need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood. . . . Moulitsas is not a naturally commanding presence--he's 5'6", slender, with a high-pitched voice and a rounded face that puts you vaguely in mind of an animated frog. . . . He never blinks.

"Everybody says I'm an ass--," Moulitsas tells Wallace-Wells. "And they're right, I am." Whatever you say.

Another Reason to Fear Global Warming

Remember the old joke about the New York Times headline, come the Apocalypse: "World Ends: Minorities and Women Hardest Hit"? Well, it's no longer a laughing matter. At least we don't think so. According to a story at BET.com, an affiliate of Black Entertainment Television, "Global Warming Could Spell Disaster for Blacks."

We had been under the opposite impression, no doubt still influenced by the teachings of Leonard Jeffries, chairman of City College of New York's black studies department in the early 1990s. Jeffries's unique contribution to scholarship was the theory that whites were "ice people" and blacks "sun people," for whom global warming would presumably mean global domination. Alas, no such luck. According to BET.com's Bruce Britt, "global warming impacts minorities and the disadvantaged harder than other groups. If global warming gets worse, many African-American communities will be more vulnerable to breathing ailments, insect-carried diseases and heat-related illness and death."

This will be doubly unfair, because, "relatively, Blacks are environmental Good Samaritans." As Britt notes, "per capita, we emit approximately 20 percent less carbon dioxide than Whites." African Americans are not entirely blame-free, however, as Britt notes that "asking Black folks to give up gas-guzzling SUV's and other bling is a tough sell."

Uh-oh, They're On to Us.

"Where do we go from here? No one knows except the new Oracle of Delphi at The Weekly Standard. When the time comes, it will speak as it has done on a number of occasions during the past five years, and President Bush, who is not known for reading magazines and newspapers, will obediently follow."

Columnist Mansour El-Kikhia, San Antonio Express-News , January 20, 2006

Book Notes

Congratulations to The Scrapbook's colleagues, who have been writing up a storm. Executive editor Fred Barnes's new book Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (Crown Forum) hit the shelves last week. And staff writer Matthew Continetti's forthcoming The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (Doubleday) will do the same in April.