Observations

The Windjammer

Perspective On The Alito Hearings

I have been watching the hearings with some degree of anticipation, hoping that someone somewhere sometime would ask one question of some importance. I gave up on the third day when I realized that my eager anticipation had already turned to boredom after the first couple of hours.

I don't know how any of your readers feel about those hearings, but when I was a boy more than seventy years ago, we had a name for the people who engaged in such base shenanigans. We called them muckrakers.

A muckrake was the garden rake we used to clean the privy which was the next to final depository of all that went through either digested or undigested. We used the muckrake when a shovel just wasn't sufficient.

We had honey dippers in my time, but those were only hired by the well-heeled, folks who might have had upwards of ten dollars or more in their bank account or stuffed under the straw mattress.

The lucky boy (I can't recall any girl ever having to operate one) who was chosen to operate the rake was called a muckraker. The term was also applied to politicians who looked through the outfall to see if they could retrieve a diamond ring which someone might have accidentally swallowed only to pass it to posterity which might not have been their own. The senators, mostly democrats, (the lower case d is intentional) were doing just that. They didn't come up with even a rhinestone or a piece of paste.

What really got my gallstones agitated was that some d official (not elected) was bragging about what she called the intelligent (?) questioning by the likes of Ted, Joe, Pat, Dick, Barb, et alii. I must have missed that one, if in fact it actually existed.

The real problem with the hearings lies in the fact that within a week after Judge Alito is solidly confirmed to take his seat in the supreme halls of justice nobody will remember the questioners nor their obvious mentality.

All that will remain is for those who are on the outside looking in to bellyache about hypothetical cases (which may never come to pass) and that they did not get to pick and choose someone such as Michael Moore to sit in the seat of honor.

The rest of us will have difficulty trying to remember whose job it really is to fill vacancies on the court(s).

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