James Wolcott: The Crying Game

[Dudley_DUright]

It seems as if it was only this afternoon--because it was only this afternoon--that conservative bloggers were flopping all over each other to express their boredom with the windbag monotony of the Alito hearings, trying to outdo each other with yawns, snores, and zzzzzzzzzz's.

Then Mrs. Alito suffered a case of the weepies that was so dramatically well-timed and patently maudlin that I was reminded of the classic stage direction in Private Eye (takes out onion, wipes away tear), and suddenly the proceedings turned into a soap opera with Fox News commentators arriving on cue to deplore the toll taken on innocent bystanders in these brutal proceedings. From their sympathetic clucks and disapproving tones you would have thought Alito had been subjected to a Stalinist show trial presided over by Randi Rhodes in a bad mood rather than honey-tongued Lindsey Graham asking Alito with tender solicitude, "Are you a bigot?" The hypocritical highpoint came when Newt Gingrich, who during his reign as Speaker of the House did more than any political leader in recent memory to dump raw sewage into the political discourse, had the gall to invoke Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical throwdown of moral umbrage during the McCarthy hearings--"At long last, sir, have you no decency?"--to showboat his phony disgust over this trivial episode of upset feelings.

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http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/01/the_crying_game.php