Alden Swan dot com

Yesterday Joe Biden was talking about the Alito confirmation hearings with Katie Couric, and suggested that “the system’s kind of broken.”

Well, duh. My question back to him would have been, “so, who broke it?”

These confirmation hearings aren’t required, but they’ve become SOP for the Senate Judiciary Committee, mainly, I think, due to the fact that they are televised. It was clear from questioning by Biden, Ted Kennedy, and others, that they were not really interested in learning anything from Alito. Rather, they were interested in 2 things: “Borking” Alito (seeing if they could get him to to say something stupid that would destroy his chances for confirmation), and in grandstanding. The grandstanding was obvious, even to the liberal press, who had to admit that some of the Dems were going over the top in their carryings-on (except for NPR’s All Things Considered, of course).

Biden took 8 of his allotted 30 minutes to ask his first question. We learned more about Biden’s views than Alito’s, and not because Alito was being non-responsive. Kennedy spent most of his time ranting about that red herring conservative Princeton group, demanding documents be subpoenaed, and in general just being Ted Kennedy. Either Kennedy is a pure idiot, or he just plays one on TV.

Kennedy should apologize to Alito and to the Judiciary Committee for his tantrum about the CAP documents. It turns out that the documents that he wanted to subpoena were freely given to him (which Kennedy’s staff, along with Committee staff members reviewed until 2 A.M. looking for smoking guns). What they found was what Alito had suggested – he didn’t appear anywhere in the documents. So, all that for nothing, except Kennedy got to accuse Alito of being a bigot, with no basis whatsoever. And again, no apologies, because after all, he’s Ted Kennedy, and he apparently doesn’t have to apologize for anything.

Also, consider the fact that no one actually expected Alito to answer the majority of questions he was asked. No judge can “guess” how he will rule on imaginary cases, nor should he. Only a fool would try – and in that regard, I guess the hearings worked to show that at least Alito is no fool.

The system is indeed broken – or at lest badly dented. Just compare the last 2 hearings (and don’t forget the Bork hearings) with earlier confirmation hearings (especially of Democratic-appointed judges). It used to be that Judges were evaluated on their qualifications, and confirmed whether they were liberal or conservative. It was the President’s call to nominate who he wanted, and this was accepted; now, the Democrats simply won’t vote for someone unless they show a streak of liberalism. Like Bush would nominate a liberal judge, just to please Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer.

Alito will be confirmed, probably along party lines, which shows that these hearings were little more than a platform for the Democratic Senators to grandstand. As I’ve said before, it is the 2-party system that appears to be broken. If this us vs. them mentality continues, it’s only going to hurt the country.

What is up with Pat Robertson? Yesterday he apparently claimed that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was punishment from God, for “dividing God’s land.” Robertson seems to have this idea that he has “inside information” about God’s wrath; however, I suspect that if God were to reveal that info to anyone, it probably wouldn’t be him.

Actually, I think Robertson is a victim of bad theology combined with old age. This whole Israel superstition thing that so many American Christians have is pretty wacky, and it’s based on a theological system that makes almost as much sense as The daVinci Code.

Without going into the whole history of dispensationalism and pre-millennialism (which, by the way, is very fascinating), it’s a theory that was developed by John Darby in the early 1800’s, and only became popular because of the unfortunate inclusion of Darby’s footnotes in the Scofield Reference Bible, which became popular with the Fundamentalists (who apparently couldn’t tell the difference between the actual text of the Bible and what was written in the margins). There’s some evidence that the original concept of dispensationalism came from a vision by a young girl in Scotland in about 1830. Regardless, this theological system has no real historical basis. In spite of its apparent following among the pop-Christian culture, it really is not a widely accepted theory.

The Pentecostal movement, with fundmentalist roots, also adopted this theology, although dispensationalism also teaches that Pentecostal gifts stopped in the first century. This inconsistency is characteristic of dispensationalism as well as its pre-millennialist view of the “end times.” In order to follow this line of thinking, you really have to chop up the Bible in pieces and ignore things like context and other basic rules of Biblical exegesis.

A part of this defective eschatalogy is the belief that God now has two chosen peoples. One is the adopted Christian church, the other is the historical Israel. The post-WW2 creation of the current nation of Israel really set the dispensationalists off, resulting in various superstitious and sometimes radical beliefs about this current secular nation of Israel.

Which brings us to Pat Robertson, apparently a product of this Fundamentalist/ Pentecostal theological mish-mash, complicated by a lack of common sense and the power of cable TV. We should all be thankful that no one really took him seriously when he tried to run for President.