One War, Many Fronts

An hour ago, Howard Dean sent an email to the Democrat faithful that links the NSA leak scandal to President Bush’s nomination of Judge Sam Alito. Of course, in Dean’s eyes, it’s not the leak that is the scandal:

We now know that George Bush personally ordered American intelligence services to spy on American citizens without the consent of any court and repeatedly directed officials to take actions that explicitly violated the law.

Really? How do we know that? What actions violated the law? What law? Dean, of course, never makes a legal argument, but assumes that his audience has been properly warmed up by the New York Times, and won’t question his assertions. He continues:

Our courts are the last line of defense against abuses of power like this, and every judicial nominee must demonstrate that they will honor their most important responsibility: protecting our rights and freedoms.
Samuel Alito will not.
During the course of his judicial career, Samuel Alito has compiled a record of looking the other way when abuses of power threaten our basic freedoms. He has deferred to unscrupulous prosecutors who constructed all-white juries to try black defendants. He repeatedly failed to protect our right to privacy. He was even the lone judge [It was a 2-1 decision] voting to uphold the illegal strip-search of a 10-year old girl.

That last one is really sick. Dean is talking about Doe v. Groody, which I wrote about here. Here is a portion of Alito’s dissenting opinion:

I share the majority

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